(1975) ***
I was kind of excited about this one because I really liked I am Legend from a couple years ago, and I'd heard that was a remake of this. This didn't totally disappoint, but it didn't really grab me either. Interestingly, I checked out Soylent Green to watch alongside this one as a double feature--I only got about 25 minutes into SG last night before getting too tired, but I'm already liking it a bit better than OM. These two, along with Planet of the Apes, represent a 1970s Charlton Heston post-apocalyptic trilogy of sorts. He's always the last sane man in a world gone crazy--unfortunately, he's not an actor I find very appealing, so I think I'm always sort of unconsciously bummed that this guy is what's left of the human race: bitter old NRA hack? Lovely.
Probably the biggest flaw in this one, compared to similar films, is that the zombie-folk are like a sissy Taliban rather than violent insane flesh eaters. Sure, they destroy art and rail against technology, but they're fucking incompetent and slow and the worst military strategists, like, ever. Heston has been holed up in a little house for 2 years keeping them at bay with some floodlights and barberd wire. The idiots have fire, and even build a cool catapult to shoot flaming balls at Heston's windows, but it never occurred to them to just burn the whole fucking place down?
There's also one of the more awkward screen romances in film history here: a 50 year old hairy chested Heston flirting with a 25 year old afro'd Harlem princesss. It comes out of nowhere and is stunning in the total absence of chemistry.
Still, this premise is one I like, and I'm giving this one a bonus star for starting the party rolling, even if it doesn't hold up well now that the genre has moved on. There's some fun to be had with Heston strolling through department stores and "shopping" for a new car, the kind of stuff you expect to see in a movie like this of course.
Incidentally, I mentioned the Taliban above, and that's because I was thinking about them while watching this one. The religious freaks in "the Family" (that's the name of the zombie-type cult trying to get Heston) do resemble the response that we're seeing around the world to globalization, modernization, and techonology. Extremist Jewish settlers, Hindu fundies, Islamofacsists, and our own fun little right wing Christians in America. "The Family" blame modernity (technology and science) for creating the plague that has destroyed the world, so they're taking it out on Heston,a scientist working on a cure. When they break into his house and slash his paintings, I was reminded of the Taliban destroying those ancient Buddhist sculptures in the mountains of Afghanistan.
And yet, I got the feeling that the movie was trying to say something a bit different--you get the sense that the family is supposed to be a critique of the some sort of extreme New Agey hippie cult. So Heston is the gun toting NRA badass saving the world from Jim Jones and his ilk. And of course he ends up having to sacrifice himself and get crucified (see silly pic of him in a pool of blood above) to hammer home this Christian allegory. Ultimately, I guess both readings work, depending on your biases.
