Richard "Big Dick Dastardly" Matheson wrote the now classic horror novel "I Am Legend" back in 1954. If someone wrote a biography about the man, an appropriate title would be "I Am (Kind Of A) Legend", because the man's made more than his fair share of contributions to the horror genre. Beyond the three four adaptations of the book that have made it onto screens (big and small), Dickie's also given us 16 classic episodes of the original "Twilight Zone" (including the two Shatner epics "Nick of Time" and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"), the much loved "Enemy Within" episode of the original "Star Trek" series, the Steven Spielberg directed Duel; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; both Trilogy of Terror flicks; and a literal ass load of TV shows! Oh yeah, and Jaws 3-D was in there somewhere too... Anyway, the whole point of this is that the man's best know work, "I Am Legend", is still making the man money over half-a-century later as Will Smith stars in the third/fourth adaptation, which is also the first to take its title from the book it's adapting. 40+ years ago though, it was Vincent Price doing the first (and many would call the greatest) feature version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth. I've never actually seen the movie myself before now, so we'll see if it's worth all the praise.

In 1965, a mysterious bacterial plague swept through Europe before riding the wind streams and hitting the rest of the planet, killing its victims and bringing them back as ghoulish vampires who survive on whatever available flesh they can find. The only person not infected by this virus would eventually be Vincent Price, a.k.a. Dr. Robert Morgan (yeah, I don't know why they changed his name either). Dr. Morgan just happens to be the one-in-10-billion guy whose immune system is unaffected by the plague (which may or may not be because of a bat that bit him in South America... yeah, a prepubescent "bat" who will do unholy things for ten bucks American), so his blood could probably have been used to make an antidote. If somebody had somehow figured this out a few weeks earlier, he might have saved at least a portion of the population, including his wife and young daughter who suffered long and hard (huh huh, "long and hard") before their agonizing deaths. But, too little too late, so Dr. Morgan *dramatic musical reverb* INHERITED THE EARTH! That's right; this Earth can be yours, if the price is right! Sorry kids, I hate to rehash old MST3K jokes, but sometimes it can't be helped.

As I was saying, Morgan (do you have a little of the Captain in you? No, not that little...) is the last genuine human being left on Earth. Being the guy in charge isn't all it's crack up to be though, as Doc and his tortured inner monologue will go on to tell us all about as our movie continues. Everybody pretty much knows the story by now (especially myself, for whom this is the third time I've sat through a different variation of the same basic story this week), but if you're late to the box social, here's the lowdown on the down low: Bobby M's actually not really the last man on Earth as the title implies, because the planet's former inhabitants are still around, only now they've been mutated into gore sucking vampire monsters, led by Bob's former lab partner, Ben Cortman. Now Bobby Bo Bobby spends every waking hour hunting and killing the beasts, which he's been doing for three years straight by the time we catch up with him. He's hopeful he can find out where the creepies crash during the daylight hours, when they're otherwise unable to function. He spends his nights in the safety of his boarded up domicile, surrounded by mirrors and garlic (the ghouls have really low self esteem and Italian food gives them heartburn...) and clutching his trusty mallet and stakes ala Abe VanHelsing until the moment his alarm clock goes off in the morning. Then it's time to grab a cup of Joe, lathe out a few more stakes, toss the bodies of the previous day's kills (who are so stiff at times you'd almost think they were dummies...) onto his giant vampire tire fire, and pick up where he left off the day before: tooling around in his hearse and hunting down the suckers' digs. I say just burn down the entire city and start new somewhere else! Preferably some place with a well stocked porn shop and Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery!... relax, I'm kidding about the PBR... or am I?

Obviously the vampires didn't retain much intelligence from their former lives, otherwise you'd think at least a few of them would have the foresight to burn all of the fuel in the city to cripple Bob's transportation, torch all of the supermarkets to deny him food and garlic, set fire to the mirror stores, and, while we're on the topic of pyro, just burn the man's house down while he's in it! At least later on, in The Omega Man, they went with the excuse that the mutants hated technology (despite how stupid it sounded) and were making an effort to destroy it before it could be used against them, while their condition made them too vulnerable to light for them to get past the floodlights set up around the perimeter of Heston's abode... though they too were apparently too busy sodomizing themselves with their own heads to think of burning up the city's fuel supply and crippling Heston's mobility and generator fuel as well... and Heston was too stupid to just pack up his shit and head to a different city to live in peace and quiet... Bah, I need not all this "logic" and "common sense"! Be gone with thee naives, and let me enjoy mine Vincent Price in peace!

Even after dark though, our pal Bobby Socks doesn't really have much to piss your pants over with these undead guys banging on his door. They shamble around like Romero born living dead (where do you think he got the idea?); wielding bits of old lumber as crude clubs and banging on the old man's door like the world's most persistent nocturnal Avon salespeople. Shit, if he'd just tie a few of those stakes of his onto the end of some poles he could just run 'em through from the relative comfort of his couch! Hell, plop down a cooler full of brews, a TV dinner, and a bedpan and he wouldn't even have to get up during "Barnaby Jones"! To keep things interesting though, Dr. M at least puts on some sassy jazz tunes to keep his ears happy while waiting to fend for his life against certain 2x4ed doom each evening! Swingin'! Seriously though, the beasts are so inept that Bob-a-Louie is comfortable enough to just fall asleep on his couch most nights, confident that they can't even bust down the boards he puts over his windows, let alone actually make it inside! And in three years he hasn't been able to kill all of these ass-hats yet!? What in the name of Carel Struycken's big, wrinkled, dick-shaped head is that all about?!

One otherwise normal day, Bob heads out to the local church to pine for his dead wife Virginia (or his boyfriend Virgil, I'm not really sure cuz all he says is "Virg. Virg. How I miss you..."), but manages to fall asleep. When he wakes up it's well past sundown, so now he needs to wade through a city of the living dead (no affiliation with Lucio Fulci, I promise) and get back to his place before the living dead fuck it up in his absence. Of course, Bob could've just stayed locked up in the church for the rest of the night and gone back in the morning, but he panics and ignores Jiminy Cricket (who was actually a morality metaphor and therefore my joke makes no sense!), instead going fist first into a small posse of the ghouls who have gathered around his car. Further proof that our protagonist has little to fear from the creatures? They go down like sacks of man-eating potatoes with little more than a limp-wristed *smack* from Captain Geezer and his brittle fists of Medicare insured fury! Remember Glass Joe, the guy you fought in the first level of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out? HE could fight off a good 20 or 30 of these Nancies before one of ‘em landed a lucky star punch to the jaw and put him down!

Bob makes it to his ride with little effort and races back to the Morgan Shack, so fast in fact that he seems to have torn a rift in space and time, speeding nonstop through both midnight and afternoon locales! That was fun Dr. M! Can we do the time warp again?! It's just a jump to the left after all... Anyway, despite being able to fight his way through five or six drunken hobos barely able to stay on their feet, how can Bob hope (Bob Hope?!) to fare as well when Zombo Ben and friends laying siege to our man's place are still bearing, that's right, sticks! Meh, just like before Bobbie has little problem getting back into his house as our hero just runs down a few of them with his car, then holds the rest off with a mirror until he gets inside. I think I'd be more frightened if the world populace had been transformed into paraplegic 3rd graders than these schmucks! Unfortunately for Dr. Morgan though, he's forced to park his car in front of the house for the night, which the ghouls take full advantage of and tear the thing apart. Big deal, the pimp on Earth's been driving the same clunker for years, it was time to trade up anyway.

There's still hope for the planet though, when a stray dog points Bob to a group of impaled vampires that he didn't kill! Will Poochie lead our hero to his first human contact since his life turned to a living Hell? Can Earth be repopulated? Against every odd known to man or beast, is it possible that of every nation on Earth, the only people immune to the plague happen to live within walking distance of each other and have gone completely ignorant of each other for 3 friggin' years!? The latter portion of our movie will cover these questions and more... I'm just not interested in finishing it up. I’ve got a date with an Evil Dead Sno-Cone Maker and a bottle of Tequila, so I'll stop it right here.

Nah, I'm kidding, I finished the movie. Shit, I sat through Killer Workout and Night Ripper in the same sitting! My Chronic Lazy-Ass Syndrome (CLAS) won't let me walk out on a flick! I just thought I'd leave a little something for those of you who have also yet to see the movie to discover for yourselves. Trust me, the title takes on a whole new meaning as the crazy hits the fan and rains all over the audience, where it starts to bond with its host and spawns more and more crazy until the military has to step in and set everyone on fire to make sure the crazy outbreak is completely contained/obliterated. As a whole, our flick works incredibly well as a study of a man whose life has little purpose beyond killing and surviving, and the madness that comes with being... wait for it... almost there... oops, went too far, let's go back just a little bit... ah, yes, there we go... THE LAST MAN ON EARTH! Seeing Bobbie's flashbacks where he's forced to watch his daughter's remains tossed into the body burning pit, then where he has to kill his vampire wife because he wanted to give her a burial instead of a cremation after she became infected, it's all painful to watch because Vincent Price is so awesome and you don't want such a great old guy to have to suffer like that! Think you had it rough when your girlfriend/boyfriend left you for your best friend because he/she has a job and knows how to please a man/woman? Vincent Price will show you how feeble your stupid little emo crap really is, kick you in the ass with his wingtip, and tell to be a fucking man/woman!

The logic farts are irritating, especially considering that the head vampire is a former scientist and can't think of any better way to get at Robert than by banging on his door with a board until it falls over. The saddest part is that even if the door does break down one of these nights, I'm not so sure the living dead would know where to go from there. These pains are outshined by Vincent Price though, via internal narrative and his emotional mud wrestling match with his own will to live, and as the man who’s hunted one way or another from opening title to end credits. The man saves the movie and makes it better than it has any right to be. And I'm not even a big fan of Vincent Price! Okay, so he's not the only weight bearing beam going on in this flick, as you can give some of that acclaim to the writing. Yeah, I know, there was plenty for me to piss and moan about, but it's a great concept and even when it loses its most fascinating aspect (as a one-man character study of isolation and diminishing sanity), the rest of the movie still plays out as a suspenseful, atmospheric little hitchhike into old fashioned horror in the time before visceral spray, butcher shop pig entrails, and machine guns with bottomless ammo clips became so central to the idea of cinematic spook shows. Even the music manages to stay intense without faltering into goofy auditory cornball territory, which so many other movies of it’s time can’t live up to. The Last Man on Earth is an excellent old-fashioned horror feature that should definitely be seen by everybody at least once. I'm just sorry it took me a quarter of a century to get around to seeing it!