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The Last Man on Earth

The Last Man on Earth

List Price: $5.98
Your Price: $5.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: VINCENT STEALS THE SHOW
Review: This film offers chilling sets and Price at his best. Price as someone who must fight on
no matter how hopeless the odes are.B&W horror at its most chilling.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great movie
Review: This is a very good adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel "I Am Legend." Vincent Price is excellent and I even prefer the movie ending to the novel's ending. My one complaint is that the fast-moving, fanged vampires in the book were far more menacing than the shuffling zombie vampires in the movie.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A classic, yet chilling B horror movie that won't let you go
Review: This movie has been out of circulation for years now, and I am glad amazon.com has found it. I remember this movie from my childhood (c.1980) from the days before VCR's when local stations bought movies and showed them every couple of months late on a Friday Night Horror Theater. Ok, the movie is a B horror flick, but once you have seen it you can't forget it. Price's haunting narration , the story told in flashbacks, and the realistic possibilities of a world-wide plague pull you right into the story. The directing is very good for the genre and keeps the movie flowing. The best reason to watch this movie is that you just have to know how it ends--you'll never guess.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: One of my FAVORITES from Chiller Theater!
Review: This movie has got to be one of my favorites from my childhood. It knocked the stuffing out of me as an kid. We had Chiller Theater on Friday nights in Columbus, where Fritz the Night Owl would show scary movies and make dry, cutting, comments at the commercial breaks. I used to wait all week to see what was on. I have always been a big Vincent Price fan, and this movie was part of the reason why. I still groan, "Morgan, come OUT!" to freak out my kids. A must have for the horror/Vincent Price afficianado.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH--DVD
Review: THIS MOVIE IS A++++. DEFINITELY SIMILIAR TO NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD AND THE OMEGA MAN.A REALLY GOOD MOVIE THAT DESERVES MORE ATTENTION. VERY WELL DONE WITH GOOD ACTING. WELL WORTH CHECKING THIS MOVIE OUT. ENJOY!!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Worth it for the Cheapness
Review: This movie is not particularly chilling or horrifying, as it was intended. Nor is it a masterwork of any genre. However, it is enjoyable just beccause of the cheap, B-movie-ness of it all, and the delightfully idiosyncratic acting of Vincent Price. Buy it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Grim and fantastic
Review: This movie shreds virtually every rule of moviemaking and screenwriting and still succeeds. Act 1 is Vincent Price by himself, with limited voiceovers, going about his day-to-day life after the world has been overrun by vampire zombies. Act 2 is an extended flashback. And Act 3 introduces a whole new character. The scriptwriting software packages would seize up and go blue-screen if you tried to write this. And yet, this unconventional structure holds this excellent film together.

Unlike other horror movies of the time, the mood of this movie is unrelentingly grim and serious. Indeed, the mood, content and cinematography foreshadow "Night of the Living Dead," another movie that was ahead of its time. No rubber-suited monsters or cheesy villians here; instead, the bad guy is a bacteria that just can't be stopped. In this respect, "Last Man on Earth" is a precursor of films like "28 Days Later," where zombification is the result of a physical process like disease, rather than some supernatural mumbo-jumbo. The bacterial basis of the vampire-zombie phenomenon adds to the realism of the film and therefore its effectiveness.

Price really shows off his vastly-underrated acting talents in what is essentially a one-man show, the most difficult of environments for an actor to shine. If you never realized how good an actor he was, you'll understand after you see this.

Of course, as a low-budget movie, there are a couple of flaws, but none of them are fatal or even particularly damaging to the film. First, the supporting players are generally terrible actors, to the point of causing me to groan "nice read!" after some of their wooden delivery. However, this is Price's film, and if some of the other cast is not up to par, you only see them for a short while before they're gone. Second, some of the bits and pieces near the ending don't quite add up. However, they still manage to add up enough to create a very effective end to the film.

This film must have fallen into the public domain, given the number of different companies that offer it, and its widespread availability in the dollar bin at various retailers. The transfer quality will obviously vary, but at these prices you can afford to gamble. Buy, buy, buy!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: This is the way the world ends
Review: Vincent Price gives a fine performance in 1964's _Last Man On Earth_, the first notable film version of Richard Matheson's novel _I Am Legend_. Price plays a scientist immune from a disease that has wiped out the world's population, struggling to keep alive by day and fend off by night the infected denizens trying to gain access to his house.

The film follows the book fairly closely, although Matheson supposedly had his name removed due to his dissatisfaction with the ending. As one of the best vampire novels ever written, the book straddles both science fiction and horror comfortably, and the film more than lives up to its father text. As a confluence of the two genres, it becomes a sci-fi version of a classic vampire tale, with a dose of allegory to boot.

It is easy to see how the film and the book were so influential on George Romero: the black and white images are suitably atmospheric and haunting, perfectly framing a post-apocalyptic plague world. The film starts off with a Kubrickian dearth of dialogue that sets a fantastic tone for the gloom of Matheson's vision. Directors Ragona and Salkow also manage well in pictorially creating the vast sense of isolation of Price's character. The film manages to be (like the book) very moving in places. Thus, it is a success despite the few plot differences, and recommended as one of the classic works of a dystopia on film.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Terrifying and disturbing.
Review: Vincent Price gives his best performance as the last man on Earth. And what a bleak earth it is, one overcome by plague, death, and cold, and overrun by zombie-like vampires. The middle of the story goes back in time, as we see how he once was a happy family man, until the plague came about. Then he was a hardworking scientist desperatley trying to stop it. And finally he was a survivor, slowly being driven to madness by both his lonliness, and the fact that the undead creatures are outside his house every night, calling his name, and trying to get him. The viewer puts himself in Morgan's shoes, imagining what it would be like to live in such a bleak, cold world. The film is very depressing, as we see him slowly lose his family to the plague. His everyday routine is maddening in itself. He sharpens stakes, seeks out sleeping vampires, stakes them, and takes them to a horrible burning pit, reminicent of the ones dug during WW2 for the executed Jews. It was shot 3 years before Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", and one can certainly see where Romero drew his inspiration, from the grainy black and white cinemotography, to the bleak storyline of the world coming to an end and being taken over by the dead. The vampires trying to break in Morgan's home at night are nearly identical to Romero's zombies, trying to get into the farmhouse. It contains many scary and disturbing images. The film is way ahead of its time, and on a shoestring budget, manages to be much scarier than any of the multimillion dollar so called "horror" that we are subject to today....highly recommended.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A moody film and a tour de force for Vincent Price
Review: Vincent Price has to practically carry the entire movie by himself, and he succeeds wonderfully. There are not any really frightening moments, but the film's slow, haunting, melancholic atmosphere more than makes up for that. The dubbing and acting are sometimes awkward, and the direction is, at best, uninspired. However, we plunge far deeper into the psychological elements of being the last man on earth than 'The Omega Man' ever did. In that film, the tragedy of the protaginist losing his wife and daughter to the plague was completely omitted, a big mistake which did not help a movie that was already tacky and ill-conceived. The premise of man being alone against the new race of humans is also preserved in 'Last Man', whilst in 'Omega Man' we had an insane cult of hippie mutants. Overall, 'Last Man' is a flawed but fascinating flick, worth seeing for Vincent Price's one-man performance and it's disturbing final scene.


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