The Omega Man

In 1971 Charlton Heston starred in an adaptation of Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend, titled The Omega Man. As with Matheson's book, it dealt with the last man on Earth, but unlike his book it didn't deal with vampires, instead the human population was wiped out by germ warfare.

Heston is Robert Neville, a military scientist who is working on a vaccine for the plague that has been spread from a border war between China and the Soviet Union. It's experimental, but when he starts feeling the effects of the disease he has no choice but to vaccinate himself. Turns out it works, which means Neville is alone in Los Angeles--during the day.

His days are spent driving around town, helping himself to wares from customer-less stores, or watching for the umpteenth time the film Woodstock (the image of Heston watching Woodstock was so bizarre that it has stuck with me ever since the first time I saw this film). At night, though, Heston has to return to his heavily fortified townhouse, because he is not truly alone--there are a band of mutated humans, suffering light-blindness and albinism, who are trying to kill him.

The film is very much from its time period. Though it is a Warner Brothers release, it has an American International vibe, especially with the casting of Rosalind Cash as a woman Heston discovers one day. She is a full-froed black power chick in the Cleopatra Jones model. The relationship that forms between the two of them is another notably wacky element of this story.

Heston, god love him, was certainly game for almost anything. His scenes when he is alone, talking to himself, dressing up in bizarre outfits and playing chess with himself, are worth the price of admission. Also a lot of fun is the "family," the brotherhood of albinos that are after him. They are led by Anthony Zerbe, who before the plague was a news anchormen, but is now a grandiloquent Luddite who looks to destroy anything that represents the world as it was before (in this way the Family is something like the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia). Zerbe, in white-face and with special contacts in his eyes, chews the scenery.

I haven't yet caught up with the Will Smith version of I Am Legend--I imagine that it's much more massive in scope than The Omega Man, which was really a glossy B-picture. It still has it's campy charms and Heston was never more of a hoot.