The Omega Man (1971)

Posted on June 12, 2020 at 3:40 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

In looking at the first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth (1964), I noted that the casting of Vincent Price was too much for Matheson, who had asked to be credited with a pseudonym on the screenplay. The next adaptation to come through the pipeline was a mere seven years later, and it similarly featured a left-field choice for the protagonist: Charlton Heston – the man who was Moses, El Cid, and Ben Hur. But Price, as I mentioned, rose to the material and invested himself completely in the role of a man made cynical by tragedy, struggling to survive in a world now populated by vampires out to feast on him. Heston, on the other hand, bends the film to his monumental image. The big studio (Warner Bros. in this case) production The Omega Man (1971) is very much a Chuck Heston vehicle. In the opening minutes, we see Heston speeding down empty Los Angeles streets, cruising along with a grin on his face until he notices a movement in a window. He quickly veers to the side of the road, pulls out an automatic rifle and opens fire on the fleeting shape. It’s hard to envision Vincent Price pulling that off. The Omega Man seems to belong so firmly as a piece of the actor’s filmography that the novel becomes an afterthought; indeed, the miniscule credit for Richard Matheson is preceded by “based on the novel by” without even noting its proper name. This feels like the middle chapter in a “Heston’s Choose Your Own Apocalypse” trilogy that began with Planet of the Apes (1968) and would end with Soylent Green (1973), and if it doesn’t loom quite so large as those two films in the pop culture arena – this film isn’t as quotable – it is certainly big enough that you’ve probably seen it (or at least bits of it on television). It’s one of the most influential films in the post-apocalypse genre. If The Last Man on Earth was the film that opened the door for Romero’s zombies, The Omega Man paved the way for Mad Max (1979) in how it treats a depopulated world as an action movie sandbox.

Watching “Woodstock,” held over for its third year straight.

It’s also served as a favorite of kids because it indulges in the fantasy of having the world (mostly) to yourself. Heston’s Robert Neville is a scientist who was carrying a critical vaccine when the Earth succumbed to a plague born out of germ warfare with the Soviet Union. Despite his circumstances as the last uninfected man, fighting against a cult-like group of albino mutants, he seems to be enjoying himself. When he crashes his car at the start of the film, he walks into a dealership and picks out a new one. He goes to the theater and watches Woodstock, another Warner Bros. picture, over and over again, despite the fact that one cannot imagine future NRA President Charlton Heston really enjoying Country Joe and the Fish (“Marijuana!”) and Arlo Guthrie and committing to memory, as Neville does, the documentary’s rambling interviews with young hippies. (For ironic reasons, the Woodstock scene is one of this film’s most famous.) Later, when he meets up with Lisa (Rosalind Cash), an infected human who isn’t showing symptoms, they become a couple and she enjoys outings to the department stores for a shopping spree (“Can I borrow your credit cards?”). Night of the Comet (1984), which is pretty much a satirical remake of The Omega Man, substitutes a pair of high school girls for Heston, and they brave a world of infected killers for a romp at the shopping mall; films like this give the audience space to imagine what they’d do with all the free time they want and full run of the city. Neville, however, lives modesty in his old residence: perched at the top of an L.A. apartment building, which is now in close proximity to the mutants who nightly try to murder him or burn his building down. He’s not terribly concerned, and if things seem to be getting too out of hand he simply walks out to the balcony and opens fire down at the street, annoyed at being interrupted while playing chess with a statue he calls Caesar.

Rosalind Cash as Lisa

None of this has much to do with Matheson’s story; indeed, the film’s plot seems to be inspired solely by the book’s last couple of chapters without adapting much of anything directly. But The Omega Man has different concerns in mind. The albinos have joined together to form a group called “The Family,” an unsubtle reference to Charles Manson’s Family, led by Anthony Zerbe (Licence to Kill) as Matthias. Somewhat like those second-stage vampires that appear only at the end of Matheson’s book, this group is articulate, can use weapons, and want to kill Neville because he represents the last of an obsolete species. They also wear black hooded cloaks like devil-worshipers from a 70’s occult horror movie, though the only apparent reason for the sinister-looking clothing is to keep them out of the light. So with the Manson Family on one side, on the other we have a group of mostly asymptomatic survivors that symbolize both Youth (including a group of children and the hippie-like optimist Dutch, played by Paul Koslo) and the Black Power movement (Cash’s Lisa, looking fabulous in her early-70’s leathers). In this context, the Woodstock clip makes a bit more sense. This is a movie about generational conflict and revolution, with the unlikely figure of Charlton Heston in the middle. Indeed, it’s understandable why Neville would fall for Lisa, less so that she would fall for the middle-aged alpha male Heston, though the film tries to sell the relationship by showing Neville revealing his tender and caring side, giving a blood transfusion to restore a boy named Richie (Eric Laneuville). Regardless, the interracial romance is a welcome touch, even more so because no one makes a big deal about it. Given that director Boris Segal (Girl Happy) leans so heavily on allegory, it should be no surprise that the final image just straight-up turns Heston into Christ on the cross, with his vaccinated blood becoming the hope of future generations. (I’m surprised no one outright says, “His blood is the life.”) But look. If you’re going to make a silly, heavy-handed, symbolism-swollen genre film, you’ll have plenty of company in the early 70’s, and The Omega Man has fun with it. All its evocation of big social themes never leads to anything deep or truly revolutionary, but you do have Heston hopping around his apartment beating back albinos wearing white contact lenses, accompanied by a bombastic score by Ron Grainer, the man who wrote the theme music to Doctor Who and The Prisoner. It’s easy to criticize The Omega Man. It’s hard not to like it.

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The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Posted on June 10, 2020 at 7:21 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend is one of the 20th century’s most influential pieces of genre fiction, the saga of a weary, grief-ravaged man who believes that he’s the last of his kind on Earth, all others having succumbed to a virus that leaves them in a state like vampirism – recoiling from their reflection or garlic; slain only by stakes; coming out in droves at night. The protagonist, Neville, survives by becoming an exterminator, chasing down the vampires during the daylight hours and driving stakes through their hearts, while gathering supplies for his barricaded home, around which the infected gather night after night. Despite the novel’s focus on a scientific explanation for vampires, the book – and its first adaptation, The Last Man on Earth (1964) – sowed the seeds for the modern vampire film: George A. Romero has cited both as an inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968), and the shadows of I Am Legend are cast over every “zombie apocalypse” tale that’s followed. And though it can claim many films as its progeny, the book has so far been adapted directly three times, with the 1964 Vincent Price film eventually eclipsed by The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston, and the long-in-development I Am Legend (2007), ultimately made with Will Smith in the lead role. Certainly, of the three, The Last Man on Earth is the most modest, lacking the production values of the Heston vehicle or the special effects and action sequences of the Smith film. Matheson was disappointed with the result himself, even though it was at least partially his screenplay; he replaced his name with a pseudonym. This is, however, as close an adaptation of Matheson’s original novel as has yet been made, and its modest, simplified approach to the material now stands out as a virtue.

Vincent Price as “The Last Man on Earth.”

Matheson originally wrote the script for Hammer, but after a time it was determined the film would never make it past the censors at the BBFC. Hammer’s Anthony Hinds sold the screenplay off to the prolific exploitation producer/director Robert Lippert, who had distributed Hammer films in the States. The film became an Italian co-production, shot in Rome, starring Price, and directed by Sidney Salkow, who had just worked with Price on the imitation-Corman horror anthology Twice-Told Tales (1963 – adapting Nathaniel Hawthorne instead of Edgar Allan Poe). Matheson liked Price – he had, after all, written several of those classic Corman/Poe pictures – but not for this part, and he was unenthusiastic about the choice of the journeyman director Salkow. You can play your own parlor game of who would have made the better Neville circa 1964 (for me, it’s John Cassavetes), or who would have been a better choice of director. But we have what we have, and for fans of Price, this is essential viewing. There’s no winking to the audience, no suggestions of comedy. Price’s character, renamed Robert Morgan here, is emotionally coming from the same place as Matheson’s creation. He’s a man so hardened by his grim routine and the tragedies in his past that he’s been stripped of hope, his humanity worn down like the stakes he endlessly carves in his fortress-like home. Price gives one of his best performances, meeting the material at just the right level.

Arriving home late means a battle for survival.

The story follows the novel closely, with one key change: Morgan/Neville is now a scientist who was researching the virus when the pandemic struck, rather than a man forced beyond his expertise (over the course of years) to research the vampires. This change adds an element of coincidence to the story: his survival doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the fact that he was studying the outbreak, and he speculates a bit absurdly, as he does in the book, that he may have immunity because he once bitten by a vampire bat. Still, the change is a logical one to expedite the storytelling and explain how he can become such an expert on the creatures that bang on his door every night. The first act is the film’s strongest, with Price wandering a deserted city, corpses strewn across the streets, and Salkow lending a documentary style to these black-and-white, dialogue-free scenes. (In one of the first shots of the cityscape, we can see traffic snaking down the side of the frame – a rather careless mistake.) He dons a gas mask, loads up his station wagon with slain vampires, drives them to “the Pit” where bodies were disposed en masse by the military, dumps gasoline on them and sets them ablaze. The sign in front of a vacant church says “The End Has Come.” When he visits a grocery store to stock up on garlic, there’s a fantastic little moment where Price kicks away the cans littering the floor without a glance down at them. The gesture contains a bitter impatience which tells us so much: he’s been here dozens of times, he hates the routine into which he’s been forced, he’s sick of the mess yet it’s pointless to clean anything up. But he’s also, as he says in narration, a “heartbeat away from Hell.” The first scene where the neighborhood vampires come staggering zombie-like into his driveway makes the Romero influence distinct, even if Salkow is less skilled at building the sense of threat. The vampires have languid movements, but when Morgan corners them in their suburban lairs in daylight, Salkow creates an effectively queasy treatment of the vampires weakly trying to fend Morgan off as he holds them down and lifts his stake.

Morgan meets Ruth (Franca Bettoia).

Those moments gain resonance in a late-film twist, as we learn of a new race being born from the plague, embodied in a woman, Ruth (Franca Bettoia), whom Morgan is surprised to encounter on one of his walks. He comes to learn, as he does in the novel, that he is as much a “legend” to them as vampires were to him – an impossible being who has been attacking their kind, and must be rounded up and executed. That they descend in military vehicles and are indistinguishable from the army we see in the film’s flashbacks is potentially rich thematic material that’s unconvincingly delivered and weakly explored; Matheson does a better job in the novel of explaining their backstory and wringing some irony from the situation (in addition, enough time passes in Matheson’s book to make their existence more plausible). The film has another weakness in its inability to hide its Italian production origins – even a newspaper headline in English bears a conspicuous grammatical error – but personally I find the European touches, even a bit of quasi-neorealism, add to the film’s charm. Of course, watching this film during a real global pandemic deepens the film in unexpected ways, such as in a flashback of the birthday party for Morgan’s daughter, in which his wife cuts off a discussion of the spreading virus by offering the empty reassurance: “With the whole world trying, there must be a solution. Right now our problem is to cut that cake.” But there is no solution to be found, and the film’s most horrifying moment comes when Morgan refuses to follow the order to let the dead be gathered for burning: instead, he buries his wife, and she comes back that night knocking on his door. Her reveal could not be bettered in any adaptation of this material – Price opens the door so slowly we start to suspect the front porch will be empty – but there she is, looking very dead and walking purposefully out of the shadow, and Price’s façade of bravery vanishes. It’s a gothic horror moment that might have appeared in a different Price movie, but so somberly played that it gets under my skin more than a horde of the undead pounding on the walls.

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The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Posted on June 8, 2020 at 2:03 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Essentially the second half of a diptych with the horror classic Doctor X (1932), The Mystery of the Wax Museum is another Warner Bros. horror film starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, directed by the great Michael Curtiz, and filmed in an alluring enhanced version of the two-strip Technicolor Process 3 (which had also been used in 1931’s The Runaround and 1932’s Manhattan Parade). Best known for decades as the film which inspired Vincent Price’s 3-D remake House of Wax (1953), it’s risen to prominence as its own very special item in recent decades thanks to the resurfacing of the original color version and screenings on Turner Classic Movies. Now Warner Archive has released a dazzling Blu-ray of the meticulous 2019 restoration from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which not only makes the Technicolor more vivid, but brings back sound effects heretofore smothered and even a bit of snipped dialogue. Thanks to Curtiz’s stylish direction and the labors of cinematographer and Technicolor specialist Ray Rennahan, Wax Museum, like Doctor X, take great strides over its contemporaries toward the kind of horror we’d see in decades to come, crossing into unreality and the grotesque with fast-paced zeal and emphasizing sensation over sense. Yet it also looks backward toward German Expressionism, borrows from the 30’s screwball comedy of The Front Page variety, and includes vintage pre-Code moments like references to drug addiction and dashes of voyeuristic sensuality.

Melting wax in the London-based prologue.

Atwill, who was enjoying a run in a number of macabre films including the same year’s The Vampire Bat, Murders in the Zoo, and Secret of the Blue Room, stars as Ivan Igor, a wax sculptor whose side street attraction in London is burned to the ground for its insurance money by his callous partner (Edwin Maxwell), who leaves an unconscious Ivan locked inside to burn to death. This prologue sets the mood nicely with the wax museum’s front entrance awash in eerie green lighting and the image of Maxwell waiting outside on a street corner, a menacing figure of mystery before he makes his formal entrance. When the conflagration begins, Curtiz offers close-ups of the melting wax faces, in stark contrast to the scenes staged with actors standing in for the wax figures (reportedly because the wax tended to melt beneath the hot, bright lights needed for the Technicolor filming). Twelve years later, we find Igor – wheelchair bound, unable to sculpt because of his burned hands, but otherwise apparently fine – presiding over a new museum set to debut in New York City. On New Year’s Eve, confetti falling like snow through the streets and revelers hanging out their windows to celebrate, the headlines tell of the suicide of celebrity Joan Gale (Monica Bannister). In the morgue, Joan’s body is stolen and lowered out the window by a monstrous figure. Florence (Glenda Farrell), a reporter eager for a big break to impress her editor (Frank McHugh) and save her job, investigates the vanished corpse, becoming convinced that there’s a bigger story here to be cracked open, while the police begin to suspect Joan of being murdered by a man (Gavin Gordon) whom Florence believes innocent. Her investigation turns to the wax museum, which employs apprentice sculptor Ralph (Allen Vincent), fiancé of her roommate Charlotte (Wray). Upon receiving a sneak preview of the attraction, Florence notices that the sculpture of Joan of Arc bears an uncanny resemblance to Joan Gale…

Charlotte (Fay Wray) discovers the true face of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill).

As the title indicates, this is a mystery, replete with red herrings, secret passages, and hidden bodies, though any modern viewer will know exactly where it’s going and what’s under the wax. It’s also, thanks to the wonderful performance of fast-talking Farrell, a perfectly functional newspaper yarn, although a half-hearted attempt at injecting some comedic romance in the closing frames is terribly miscalculated for either romance or laughs. If this is to be classified as a horror-mystery, note that the horror lands with much greater impact than the films of the era we’d associate with that subgenre. That’s because in such films the monster is usually unmasked as an everyday schemer; here, the man is unmasked as a monster – literally, as Wray claws through Atwill’s face and lets rip her trademark scream at the visage she finds underneath. Wray gets higher billing than Farrell, but she’s really a secondary character here, becoming a damsel in distress in the final act when she discovers a hidden, subterranean wax factory. Curtiz and art director Anton Grot (Doctor X, Svengali, Baby Face) carry us to this revelation down long crooked steps straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and through womb-like passages until the bubbling vat of wax sits like a massive witch’s cauldron against a science fiction control room backdrop. Curtiz also serves up a towering deaf-mute named Hugo (Matthew Betz) employed as one of Igor’s sculptors, though – in a fine gag – he has a tendency to give the statues his own face. Setting the tone for future wax museum thrillers, Curtiz emphasizes the confusion between the real and the simulated, including a close-up of a blade being slipped into a bloody wound, which, when revealed in full, is an historical recreation of Marat being stabbed in his bath. In a film like this, the horror is self-reflexively part of the display (at one point Igor pompously dismisses the idea of lowbrow Chamber of Horror attractions, though his museum is not short on the macabre). The two-strip Technicolor process may seem crude by today’s standards of vivid HD, but the stylized colors enhance the sensation of watching a lurid entertainment just a step beyond the real – ideal to enjoy this restoration of the marvelous Mystery of the Wax Museum.

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