The way you just wrote about this movie based on the trailer, was exactly right SZ. Also, I might add that this is extremely upsetting and not to be confused with entertainment. I was close to tears seeing this small bit. Especially Will with the dog. Maybe I am too sensitive but this was just devastating.

I've said it before, but McCarthy's The Road is evoked in this one. We aren't very far away from this type of "reality". I hope I am terribly off base here, and so very wrong. I hope someone who posts here will tell me how wrong this idea is.

Bad dreams tonight.

Where I am, a local public access cable channel occasionally runs films when they need to fill a spare ninety minutes or so. The prints are always bad, and the sound worse, but it's interesting to see what the kids down in the studio will pick. A few weeks ago, they put up Romero's original Night Of The Living Dead; this week it was The Last Man On Earth.

Last Man was released in the U.S. in 1965. It had begun as a property owned by Hammer Films in England, with Richard Matheson writing a script after his novella, "I Am Legend". Hammer passed on it, but sold production rights to the concept (without Matheson's script) to a cut-rate American producer who filmed it quickly in Europe to save costs.

As a kid, I'd read Matheson's novella, set in post-apocalypse Los Angeles; reading the story, as a sort-of Southern Californian, it was easy for me to visualize Los Angeles after the plague. However, Last Man was shot in and around Rome: The architecture, the landscape, the foliage was supposed to be American -- but while in college, as I sat getting loaded and watching it on teevee, it looked like... well, it was Italy, for cryin' out loud. And even after several bottles of Chateau Du Safeway, we spotted most of the film's 'goofs' now listed on the imdb.com site.

My favorites were seeing vehicles driving around in the far background in a number of shots of 'deserted America'; or, Price (who has been out hunting vampires for two or three years) needing to stock up on garlic to keep vampires away -- and stopping in an abandoned grocery store. Garlic won't last in my kitchen for two weeks, let alone three years. I hadn't seen goofs that obvious in a film since spotting a dead slave wearing a wristwatch in the slow-pan-over-the-battlefield shot in the last reel of Spartacus.

Following Matheson's novella, Price played an ordinary man, uninfected by a plague which arrived from Europe, who does more than fight the vampire-survivors just to stay alive; he actively hunts them. Befriending an apparently uninfected girl, it's revealed that she is part of a new society -- of vampires, people who are otherwise normal except for living at night and lusting for blood. By weight of numbers, they are the victims. Price is the monster, the boogeyman who comes in the daylight with garlic and a stake.

The next take on Matheson's story, The Omega Man was released in 1971 with Charlton Heston (who had made Planet Of The Apes in 1968). Oddly, in a bit of deja vu, 'Omega' was made after purchasing the rights from Hammer Films -- which had still considered making a film from Matheson's script.

The property had a new working title of "Night Creatures", but British censors considered the whole concept too graphic for 1969-70, and again sold the production rights to Americans -- an empty world with decayed corpses and vampires was not entirely okay for censors here, either (there was plenty of real gore on the nightly news, courtesy of the war in Vietnam), so some changes had to be made.

Omega Man was set in L.A., and Heston's character was named Robert Neville -- both identical to Matheson's story. But the plague survivors in Neville's Los Angeles were not nocturnal vampires -- just albino, deranged paranoids, wearing black monk's cowls and suffering from a terrible sensitivity to sunlight. They were Luddites, to boot, organized around an anti-technological dream in a group called "The Family".

Heston's nemesis was the leader of the group, wacky ol' Matthias ("You -- you creature of the wheel!"), played by Anthony Zerbe -- who had a small, supporting role opposite Heston as a ranch hand in the western, Will Penny (1968), released not long before Planet Of The Apes (also 1968). And, Matthias' right-hand 'Family' member ("Just let me put some explosive to him, brother -- just a little nitro!") was played by Lincoln Kirkpatrick, who would appear opposite Heston two years later in Soylent Green (1973) as the Catholic priest. I wonder if Zerbe, Kirkpatrick and Heston ever talked on set about prior shoots working together.

It wasn't a terrible movie; it was Heston's second science fiction film, released after Apes, and before Soylent Green. It had a typical look-and-feel of back-lot production values possessed by many Columbia, 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers films from the late 60's and early 70's. Watching Heston's acting (he seemed to be playing Robert Neville as if it was his Michelangelo from Agony and the Ecstasy) made me feel his career had to be headed for the toilet. I felt painfully embarrassed for him -- but took all of that back retroactively when he became the face of the NRA.

I'm a fan of end-of-the-world films (you really want to be frightened, see the 1984 BBC production, Threads) -- so I'm interested to see what I Am Legend's version will be.

I was surprised to see no mention of the 1985 New Zealand movie The Quiet Earth, about a scientist who gets out of bed one morning to discover that he's apparently the only person on earth. Very different movie, but an obvious comparison, yes?

I was fully expecting one of you to clatter on about the book "The World Without Us" and nitpick till death do us part about what happens when cities die. I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Side note. This version of the Omega Man will probably be more about Will Smith and Will Smith's character than the actual story arc. Will Smith makes some good movies but he's nearly as big a megalomaniac as Kevin Costner. I, Robot was so much weaker than it could have been for example - we just didn't need Will Smith being Will Smith so much.