Bad Trip to Italy

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)

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.

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon

He is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson (2009), edited by Christopher Conlon with an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, containing the following stories:

Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King
Recalled by F. Paul Wilson
I Am Legend, Too by Mick Garris
Two Shots from Fly's Photo Gallery by John Shirley
The Diary of Louise Carey by Thomas F. Monteleone
She Screech Like Me by Michael A. Arnzen
Everything of Beauty Taken from You in This Life Remains Forever by Gary A. Braunbeck
The Case of Peggy Ann Lister by John Maclay
Zachry Revisited by William F. Nolan
Comeback by Ed Gorman
An Island Unto Himself by Barry Hoffman
Venturi by Richard Christian Matheson
Quarry by Joe R. Lansdale
Return to Hell House by Nancy A. Collins
Cloud Rider by Whitley Strieber 

Award-winning, enjoyable anthology celebrating the late, great Richard Matheson, whose horror and suspense work in print, in movies, and on TV helped define horror and suspense for two generations of readers and viewers.  Duel; The Shrinking Man; Hell House; I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Stir of Echoes; Somewhere in Time; episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the William Shatner-on-a-plane "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remade with John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie; adaptations of Poe for Roger Corman's film studio: these are just some of Matheson's contributions to pop culture. 

The stories include homages, sequels, revisionist takes, and riffs on Mathesonian ideas. "Cloud Rider" by Whitley Strieber is the wildest riff in the anthology, inspired as it is by Matheson's entire Collected Stories. The other stories are a bit more specific.

Standouts include Nancy Collins' novella-length prequel to Hell House, that inspired haunted-house story of the 1960's. Collins shows us the events that preceded those in Matheson's novel, to good effect. Mick Garris also offers a prequel in "I Am Legend, Too," and it also offers a revisionist take on the original Matheson novel's vampire-fighting protagonist from the POV of his vampiric next-door neighbour. "She Screech Like Me" by Michael A. Arnzen effectively extends Matheson's stunning debut story, "Born of Man and Woman," while "The Diary of Louise Carey" by Thomas F. Monteleone retells The Shrinking Man from the viewpoint of his increasingly beleaguered, non-shrinking wife.

The venerable William F. Nolan offers a short, brutal sequel to another Matheson horror story, while Joe Lansdale presents a sequel/sidequel to Matheson's "Prey" -- a.k.a. the Matheson story adapted for the TV movie Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black does battle with a tiny, violent, highly animated African fetish doll in her own apartment. And Stephen King and son Joe Hill (King) collaborate on a story for the first time, a riff on "Duel" that involves a motorcycle gang and a transport truck instead of the original's station-wagon-driving salesman and a monster of a truck.

Overall, this is a fittingly strong anthology to honour such a major figure in the modern history of fantasy. As Ramsey Campbell notes in his introduction, Matheson helped move horror out of Gothic castles and into suburban bedrooms and America's endless blacktop highways. And because Matheson worked in television and movies so much after 1960, his works reached much larger audiences than those generally afforded writers of prose. Recommended.

Truck Monster

Duel: adapted by Richard Matheson from his novella; directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Dennis Weaver (David Mann) (1971): The late, great Richard Matheson adapted his own novella for this television movie, one of the first (and best) things ever directed by Steven Spielberg. Hitched to a great script, the young Spielberg pretty much shoots out the lights in this gripping, terse tale of Man vs. Truck(driver). David Mann vs. Truck(driver), actually.

Dennis 'McCloud' Weaver plays David Mann, a frustrated California travelling salesman driving through California's scrub brush and deserts to make an appointment. He's having problems at home, centered around his wife's perception of him as something of a nebbish. Then he innocently passes a slow-moving truck. All hell follows.

You can view this a great thriller with a sub-text that deals with a modern man's battle with his own feelings of inadequacy and emasculation. You can view this as a thriller of paranoia and terror, as the early stages of Mann's battle with the truck-driver (never fully glimpsed at any point during the movie) repeatedly put Mann in situations in which no one believes that he's in a duel to the death with a crazy person.

Weaver is flat-out terrific, sympathetic and squirmy. Screenwriters aspiring or otherwise should look at this film as a model of how to effectively use voiceover narration in a movie. We're privy to Mann's internal dialogue at points, and it's beautifully done. The scenery is suitably deserted. The truck, as much a character as Weaver, is about as sinister a vehicle as one could want, grimy and menacing and way, way too fast for its weight class.

Duel taps into very specific fears related to driving, and driving around large trucks. But it's also rich and wide-ranging in its use of fear and suspense. There are moments that have the quality of a nightmare, and suspense scenes that Spielberg would never surpass in all his later years of film-making.

In a way, this is a companion piece to two of Matheson's great 1950's novels that were adapted into movies, The Shrinking Man and I am Legend. Both dealt with self-doubting masculinity left virtually alone to confront some mounting horror. Taken together, they form a triptych, though I am Legend has never received a satisfactory film adaptation in the way the other two have. Highly recommended.

Hello, Walls!

The Legend of Hell House: adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel; starring Roddy McDowall (Ben Fischer), Pamela Franklin (Florence Tanner), Clive Revill (Dr. Barrett), Gayle Hunnicutt (Ann Barrett) and Michael Gough (Belasco) (1973): The late, great Richard Matheson adapts his own haunted-house novel here in effective fashion, especially given what couldn't be shown in a movie of the time. The whole thing even manages to make an impossible-not-to-laugh cat-attack scene work without the benefit of CGI.

Where Matheson's I Am Legend gave vampires a scientific rationale for existing, The Legend of Hell House offers a quasi-scientific exploration of an extraordinarily dangerous haunted house. There's certainly a tip of the cap to Shirley Jackson's monumental haunted-house novel The Haunting of Hill House starting with the title and the four-person psychic investigation team.

But whereas Jackson's novel offered no real antagonist other than the house itself, Matheson's work gives us a malign human -- Emeric Belasco, builder of the house and a Satanic presence who would have made Aleister Crowley look like the Church Lady.

Back in the 1920's, Belasco built the house and then sealed it away from the outside world with its two-dozen or so inhabitants inside. When the house was opened, everyone was dead and Belasco had vanished. One of the subtle drolleries of Hell House is that the most haunted house in the world is less than 50 years old: it was built to be haunted.

Teams investigating the house have been devastated by Something, to the extent that the only one of a dozen previous investigators to survive both physically and mentally is Roddy McDowall's Ben Fischer. Fischer was a teen-aged medium when he entered Hell House with the last group to investigate it before the events of the novel. Now, he's the middle-aged Voice of Doom with a new team which ultimately aims to use technology to dissipate Hell House's restless spirits. Good luck with that.

The performances here are all fine, and suspense builds to a satisfying conclusion. McDowall is especially fine as the withdrawn and wounded Fischer. The book fleshed out Fischer's personality by describing his thoughts and experiences. Here, McDowall has to build his wounded psychic without the benefit of voice-overs. I think he succeeds admirably, as does the movie itself. Highly recommended.

The Mighty Matheson

The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson, containing "Being," "Pattern For Survival," "Steel," "The Test," "Clothes Make The Man," "Blood Son," "Trespass," "When Day Is Dun," "The Curious Child," "The Funeral," "The Last Day," "Little Girl Lost," and "The Doll That Does Everything" (1957): Thanks to his own television and movie work, and adaptations of his stories for those media by him and others, and all the parodies and homages and outright steals of his ideas by the makers of movies and TV shows, Richard Matheson has become one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century when it comes to popular culture. And he's still alive. It's a remarkable career, but it all started with the printed page, and an astonishing and prolific run of stories and novels in the 1950's and early 1960's, a time period from which this collection hails.

　
I suppose Matheson's closest 'lookalike' is Robert Bloch, about ten years older but with a similar pedigree in several media. Bloch's most famous achievement was writing the novel from which Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho. Matheson's biggest moment is a bit harder to pin down. The panicky airline passenger played by William Shatner in the Twilight Zone series and John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ movie? That's Matheson's creation. Recent movies based in whole or in part on Matheson's stories and novels include I am Legend, Real Steel, and The Box.

　
His novella "Duel" supplied pretty much a shot-by-shot blueprint for his own screenplay for Steven Spielberg's TV-movie breakthrough of the same name; his story "Little Girl Lost", adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery, supplied Spielberg's Poltergeist with its girl who vanished in her own living room. His novel The Shrinking Man spawned two adaptations; the novel I am Legend spawned three official ones and at least one acknowledged unofficial one (Night of the Living Dead) making Matheson the grandfather of the entire zombie genre and of the scientifically plausible vampire sub-genre).

　
The stories here show Matheson in solid, genre-crossing form. Science-fictional horror occurs in "Being" and "Trespass"; nuclear apocalypse spawns both satire ("When Day is Dun", "Pattern for Survival") and elegy ("The Last Day"); at least four stories here would be adapted at least once for television and/or movies ("Steel", "Blood Son" (itself suggesting an unacknowledged source for George Romero's vampire film Martin), "The Funeral" and "Little Girl Lost."

Matheson established his plain prose style, shot through with startling images and turns of phrase, pretty early, but it was his ability to find new horrors, and new combinations of horrors, thrills and genre concepts, that made him so invaluable -- he helped firmly establish the American supernatural tale both in terms of pure science fiction and in terms of finding new ways to present old horrors such as vampires and werewolves and haunted houses. And he could be funny, as he is here in "When Day is Dun", "Pattern For Survival" and "The Funeral." A brilliant, influential writer caught at the prolific beginning of a half-century career. Highly recommended.