The Last Man on Earth

Robert Morgan has been alone for three years. By day he drives through the city collecting garlic and mirrors, burning the dead, then seals himself indoors before dark. At night, voices outside the door call him by name. The film is not really about fighting monsters. It is about grief that has hardened into routine. Morgan keeps a diary, a stockpile, a record player and a schedule, and the film shows that schedule over and over until loneliness reads as a job. The final reversal sits on the same idea: which side is the freak. The form is cheap but chosen. The late-rationalist architecture of Rome's EUR district stands in for an emptied American city, and it plays wide, unpeopled and unnervingly clean. It is adapted from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Matheson worked on the screenplay but was unhappy enough with the result to have his name removed, crediting himself as Logan Swanson. The same novel was filmed twice more, as The Omega Man and as I Am Legend; of the three, this one stays closest to the book's ending. Vincent Price leads, with Franca Bettoia and Emma Danieli. Directing duties were split between Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, melancholy, low-budget science fiction. Who it is not for: anyone after sustained tension; the attack scenes are close to lethargic and make no attempt to hide it.