The Last Man on Earth (1964) – Review

One of the most influential post-apocalyptic stories out there is that of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a novel that pitted the last remaining human on Earth against a world populated by vampires, and while many other authors have since tackled similar subject matter it’s Matheson’s iconic story that has stood the test of time, but as for movie adaptations, this one story had a more troubling journey.

This movie opens with “The Last Man on Earth” Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) a man living in a world where everyone else has been infected by a plague that has killed the bulk of the world’s population or turned them into undead, zombie-like creatures that cannot stand sunlight.  They fear mirrors and are repelled by garlic, which makes them sound like vampires but these weak, unintelligent, and shambling monstrosities that Morgan is able to brush off with ease are a far cry from the traditional vampires we’ve seen in movies and literature over the years. We are first introduced to Morgan as he goes about his day, making a fresh batch of wooden stakes for his vampire hunting and carting off corpses to a massive burning pit for their disposal, as well as putting up with the nightly moaning of his ex-best friend, now vampire gatecrasher, Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), whose rantings of “Morgan! We’re going to kill you!” would get on anyone’s nerves.  It should be noted that Vincent Price doesn’t seem all that dynamic as a vampire killer, he simply wanders into a room to stake whatever hapless vampire he encounters, as if he’s just punching a clock rather than ending a life, and author Richard Matheson always thought someone like Gregory Peck or Rod Taylor would have been more appropriate to portray as a post-apocalyptic hero and as much as I love Vincent Price I tend to agree with him on this point.

“I should have called Peter Cushing for advice.”

Not long after settling us into this bleak and disturbing world, one littered with corpses and empty streets, the film rips us away from that world and into a series of overlong flashback sequence that details the arrival of the “Vampire Plague” and it is here that we see Morgan’s happy family life taking a terrible turn when his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli) and daughter Kathy (Christi Courtland) both succumb to the plague, but this is before it was widely known by the public that the dead would return to life so instead of taking his wife to the public burn pit used to dispose of his daughter’s corpse, as was required by government edict, he privately buries her, only for her to show up at his door later that night. As mentioned, the vampires in this film have very little in common with most literary or cinematic counterparts, other than those few vampiric weaknesses and their need to be staked.  They don’t even come across as much of a threat and when Morgan’s wife arrives at his door the film jumps back to the present and I’m left to assume that he just asked her to leave.

“Can I interest you in any of our wonderful Amway products?”

With those flashbacks out of the way we get back to our movie “Already in Progress” where Morgan has a brief respite from his post-apocalyptic ennui when a dog appears in the neighbourhood, but this movie has no time for any sort of “Man in His Dog” story as the poor thing is soon revealed to have become infected with the plague and Morgan is forced to bury the creature with a stake through its heart, but things start to look up when, while he’s burying his dog, he spots a woman walking around in the daylight and when he chases after he learns that her name is Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia) and that for three years she has been living on the run from the vampire hordes. Unfortunately, she fails the garlic test and Morgan is able to confirm that she is infected, yet there is a new wrinkle to her story, apparently, she is part of a new society, one that has developed a vaccine that allows them to function normally with the drug in the bloodstream and she has been sent to spy on Morgan.

This is why reading a dating profile thoroughly is so important.

Ruth explains that her people are planning to rebuild society as they destroy the remaining undead humans, she then points out that many of the vampires Morgan killed were still alive, and it’s at this point that Morgan starts to come to grips with the whole “I Am Legend” part of the story as he comes to the realization that he is actually the monster of this story and the only real way out is death. The film ends with a bizarre chase sequence, with a militant group of “good vampires” chasing poor Morgan around the city until eventually cornering him in a church, which allows him to get a nice “spear in the side” moment that isn’t quite as Christ-Like as the one Charlton Heston got in The Omega Man but close enough. Unfortunately, Morgan’s dying rant of “You’re freaks! I’m a man! The last man!“ really undercuts his early realization that he was the real monster in this equation.

“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, you guys all suck!”

Stray Observations:

• A common vampiric trait is their inability to cast a reflection in mirrors, yet for some reason in this film, they are repelled by their reflections. In the book, they suffered from something called “Hysterical Blindness” and thus couldn’t see their reflection.
• Morgan keeps his home boarded up, with crosses, garlic, and mirrors at every entrance, but his bedroom window is broken and basically open, which seems like a fatal oversight.
• Even though his door is covered in a variety of “vampire repellants” it doesn’t seem to stop them from gathering around to bang on it with their fists and clubs.
• One thing that always bothers me in post-apocalyptic movies is everyone’s reliance on gasoline, despite the fact that regular gasoline has a shelf life of three to six months, and that’s if properly stored, while in this movie Morgan has been living in a desolate world for three years so the gas for his generator and car would be quite unusable.
• With the whole world to choose from it’s odd that Morgan would pick his suburbanite home as a refuge when so many other places would be easier to defend. One must assume that he stays there to futilely hang onto the one remaining piece of his past.
• Morgan gives Ruth a transfusion and she is instantly cured of her vampirism; this miraculous moment is then immediately forgotten, and I must ask “With her being cured can she stay still with this new vampire society?”
• While fleeing the “good vampires” Morgan breaks into the police armoury and grabs a few gas grenades, leaving behind several automatic weapons that would have been much more useful.
• The vampires in this film are almost zombie-like, whereas, in the novel, they are fast and capable of running and climbing, making this film a precursor to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in fact, Romero openly admits to ripping of this movie to make his horror flick.

“They’re coming to get you, Morgan.”

As different as this is from the novel it still remains the most faithful version of Matheson’s story, which isn’t saying much considering The Omega Man and Will Smith’s I Am Legend barely resembled the source material, and even though the author was so dissatisfied with the result that he utilized a pen name instead of his own for screen credit one has to admit that this film at least captured the overall theme of the book, if not the mechanics of the vampire world he had created. Shot on a relatively small budget The Last Man on Earth does look fairly good, cinematographer Franco Delli Colli provided some truly beautiful black and white photography, and Vincent Price gives a solid performance as a man beaten down by the unbearable weight of being trapped in a world of the dead. With a proper script, a decent budget, and better direction this could have been a true classic, instead of being relegated as a lesser Vincent Price vehicle, and who knows, maybe someday we will get a proper adaptation of this classic horror story.