The Last Man On Earth (Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow, 1964)

Another day to live through. Better get started.

There's a weird realism going on in The Last Man On Earth, a simultaneously highbrow and low-fi adaptation of Richard Matheson's seminal I Am Legend, in which a man fills the post-apocalyptic days by combating the legions of vampiric proto-zombies that serve as the last echoes of the race. Four years before Romero captured the zeitgeist and set out to make a career out of the unending metaphorical resonance of zombies, The Last Man On Earth adapts Matheson's novel as a gothic zombie extravaganza in which Vincent Price, America's creepy uncle, is supposed to be our proxy, our witness to a world now gone.

Price is Robert Morgan, the scientist who thinks himself to be the last remaining human. Searching for purpose, he makes it his mission to find the plague's vampires during their daily rest and destroy them while they sleep. As in the novel, their vampirism is absent supernatural forces, a shift that becomes vital for Romero's films to have the power they do years later. The idea of the coming plague, the inadequacy of our preparation, and the subsequent and inevitable fascism that would arise are all handled broadly but effectively in The Last Man On Earth. While the film's zombie attacks are laughable, the flashback that stops the film's momentum and constitutes the center third is rife with terrifying moments of familial decline, as when Morgan's daughter goes blind or his wife finally succumbs to the plague.

In the end, though, the film is as and clunky and shambling as its undead hordes. As with Steve Buscemi, I will never buy Vincent Price as a stand-in for the everyday guy. There's just too much wrong there. And in Last Man On Earth, instead of his usual uber-creep, Price is working with a mundanity that reads as exhaustion. Whether he's distractedly staking a vampire, ignoring his dying daughter, or shuffling idly after a woman who may or may not humanity's last hope, Price seems as though he can't really be bothered.

Having seen The Omega Man, the funky 1970s adaptation starring Charlton Heston as a groovy badass mowing zombies down with a submachine gun before having sex with them (I'm almost positive that happens, or maybe it just felt like that), I expected The Last Man On Earth to similarly avoid tackling the final question of Matheson's novel: What is it that makes a monster? I was pleasantly surprised to find that the adaptation, while awkward, is intact, and though Matheson requested that his name be removed from his screenplay, a lot of his ideas are still given their proper weight. The muddiness of the last third that serves as the novel's greatest strength is rendered accurately and with a little wry irony, something the nation wouldn't discover properly until Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Always remember, zombies are funny.