The Snow Devils (1967): written by Aubrey Wisberg, Ivan Reiner, Bill Finger, and Charles Sinclair; directed by Antonio Margheriti; starring Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Commander Jackson), Ombretta Colli (Lisa Nielson), and Renato Baldini (Harris):
The last of four Italian science-fiction movies made for TV and released theatrically in the United States known collectively as Gamma One, after the space station in all four films.
In the near-future, Gamma One helps protect Earth from alien threats. In this case, green-faced Abominable Snowmen from space with a weather machine that can melt the ice caps. And pretty much all other icy places -- the alien base is located in the Himalayas, not generally found at the North or South Pole.
It's all wacky, badly dubbed into English fun. Sure, the Yeti are a bit of a disappointment -- worker snowmen wear overalls, leader snowmen red capes. Only about a third of the movie takes place in the Himalayas. Outer space action occurs throughout, especially in the climactic assault on the alien base orbiting Callisto. Jolly fun. Recommended.
The Last Man On Earth (1964): adapted from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend by William Leicester, Richard Matheson, Furio Monetti, and Ubaldo Ragona; starring Vincent Price (Dr. Robert Morgan), Franca Bettoia (Ruth Collins), Enna Danieli (Virginia Morgan), and Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Ben Cortman):
The cheapest version of Richard Matheson's revisionist vampire novel I Am Legend is also the most faithful and the best, despite some deficiencies in direction, set design, and pacing.
If you are scoring at home, the other two adaptations are Will Smith in I Am Legend (really, really unfaithful) and Chuck Heston in The Omega Man (a sudden left-turn into unfaithfulness about halfway through). Notable riffs include the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment "The Homega Man" and George Romero's seminal zombie flick Night of the Living Dead.
Also, why change the name of the titular protagonist from Robert Neville to Robert Morgan?
Filmed in Italy, The Last Man On Earth offers us Vincent Price as the only non-Italian actor. He's terrific in a rare sympathetic role in a horror movie. He elevates the material the way great actors do.
In an unnamed American city (it's LA in the novel but played by some Italian city here), Price's character survives hordes of stupid, zombie-like vampires by night and creeping despair by day. He's been holding out for three years. Everyone, including his wife and daughter, is either dead or a vampire.
But Morgan keeps going, having cobbled together a daily routine of staking vampires, collecting supplies, and various other tasks. Is he truly the last man on Earth?
The wonkiness of the set design mainly manifests in Morgan's house, which does not look like it could keep out a five-year-old, much less a horde of vampires, no matter how stupid they are. The movie also rushes to an ending after a fairly slow build, as if the producers suddenly ran out of money.
But amidst the cheapness and the mistakes, there's a real sense of isolation and apocalyptic melancholy, along with some striking scenes of Price alone in an empty city. All this and a poignant sub-plot involving a dog! Recommended.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954): Matheson's first novel begat Night of the Living Dead which begat pretty much every zombie apocalypse of the last 50 years on TV, in movies, and in print. While I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen three times, no one has ever captured its portrayal of abject loneliness. Humanity may have been devastated by a plague of vampirism, but protagonist Robert Neville's tortured thoughts and actions make the novel special as a work of literature and not just as a massive cultural influence.
The novel may be set in the late 1970's, but Neville is very much a 1950's Everyman figure. He dwells in a suburb of Los Angeles with a wife and a daughter. He carpools to work with a neighbour. He drinks a lot of cocktails. But a vaguely defined war in which Neville himself served overseas may have unleashed the disease that caused all those stories of vampirism in Eastern Europe during the 18th century. In the now of the novel, which we join in media res, Neville is alone but under siege by multitudes of vampires every night. He's turned his house into a fortress. And every day, he drives around pulling vampires out of their hiding places and staking them to death.
For a short novel (maybe 70,000 words soaking wet), I Am Legend is packed with heady goodness. There's the characterization of Neville, who reveals hidden depths as we spend more time with him. There's Neville's scientific approach to understanding just how these vampires work, and what works against them, and why. There's the back-story of the fall of society, with mass graves and an incompetent government and growing paranoia.
And there are the vampires themselves, split into two groups: living vampires who've been infected and changed, and dead vampires who continue to be animated by the contagion. Both die when you stake them, though the second group occasionally disintegrates. Neville's quest to understand what's going on in a scientific sense helps him to hold off the encroaching loneliness. He's Robinson Crusoe with a microscope and no Man Friday. He doesn't even have a parrot to talk to. But he does have his books and his classical music.
The list of later works with I Am Legend's DNA in them could probably fill a book. From Matheson's succinct glimpses of plague-fueled societal breakdown come World War Z and The Stand and so many others; from the monsters whose origins seem to be scientifically explicable come legions of infected zombies and vampires whose blood teems with bacteria or viral loads instead of magic. It's the loneliness of Neville that hasn't been replicated that often in subsequent works of horror.
Thankfully, there's also grim humour throughout the novel, much of it supplied by Neville's dead but lively vampire neighbour Cortman (!), who yells endlessly at Neville by night but whose diurnal hiding place Neville searches fruitlessly for by day. Good old Cortman. He never shuts up. Highly recommended.
