The Last Man on Earth (1964) Review

Tagline: Alive among the lifeless... alone among the crawling creatures of evil that make the night hideous with their inhuman craving!

The Last Man on Earth (1964) Review

 

Vincent Price was one of those actors who could play a great bad guy and a great good guy. In The Last Man on Earth, he’s the protagonist Dr. Robert Morgan, who finds himself, as the title would suggest, in a world without any other living people. A plague has swept the planet, but he’s immune thanks to the bite of a South American bat years before. The dead roam the night, and by day he carries on in the post-apocalyptic world, staking the infected, who are like a cross between the traditional vampire and traditional zombie. They can’t survive in sunlight, are repelled by garlic and mirrors, but are slow moving and unintelligent. Morgan struggles to carry on, but it turns out he might not be the only one left alive.

As a kid, this movie really freaked me out. It was one of three Vincent Price flicks on a DVD I picked up at a department store, along with House on Haunted Hill and The Bat. This one was the only one with an R-rating, though I think it was just for that particular release. In the 1980’s, The Last Man on Earth fell into the public domain, which means anyone can distribute it and you can legally watch it for free online. It also means there are lots of cheap re-releases of it, and my copy was one such example.

Vincent Price narrates a lot of the story, in place of having him converse with other characters. It’s a bit of a cheap gimmick, but the reason it doesn’t get annoying is because of Mr. Price himself. That man’s voice is so charming it never gets old hearing him narrating even mundane tasks or making humdrum comments. Of all the roles he had over his long career, this has to be one of his best. He’s haunted by the present as much as the past. There’s a great extended flashback to Morgan’s daughter and wife being claimed by the plague, and then later at night his wife returning to the house from the grave, smudged in dirt, moaning his name, coming for him, and that part scared me enough as a kid I had to look away.

To examine the movie now, it’s obviously dated, the production quality isn’t that high, and many of the scenes are slow. I laughed at a few parts as a kid, too, and still do. There’s something both funny and scary about the undead banging on the boarded up windows, relentlessly moaning “come out, Morgan!” However, looking at it through an adult lens in 2021, certain aspects display a timeless sense of terror (seeing the piles of burning bodies is a visual that will never lose its impact), and it’s worth noting that it predates Night of the Living Dead, which is cited as being the number-one influence on the zombie sub-genre, but The Last Man on Earth clearly left a lasting impact as well. This was the first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, which was adapted again in 1971 as The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, and again in 2007 starring Will Smith, which used the novel’s title and remains the most well-known version today.

I don’t think there’s really an argument to be made about The Last Man on Earth being the “best” adaptation of I Am Legend so far, because every adaptation feels so different from one another and from the source material, but as far as 1960’s horror films go, it’s among my favourites, which says a lot given it was the same decade that saw the releases of such classics as Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho, just to name a few. It’s a classic in its own way.