Vincent Price stars in the surprisingly limp The Last Man on Earth (1964), a movie chronicling the travails of a scientist, Robert Morgan, who is the only unchanged survivor of an unspecified bacterial plague. There are other ‘survivors’, but they die in sunlight, are averse to garlic and mirrors, and… need I go on?
Through flashbacks we see his research attempting to cure the plague (unconvincing), his arguments with a friend over the nature of the plague, and the death of his young child (thrown into a pit and burned to prevent her from “returning”). The problem with the movie begins somewhere in this sequence, as Morgan’s argument with his friend has Morgan scoffing at reports of the dead returning to ‘life’. It’s a rather lifeless argument, and within moments we transition to the loss of his child and the death – and return to life – of his wife. He may be horrified at these events, but we’ve lost some emotional punch that goes with Morgan realizing he was wrong about the argument.
Back in the present, the physically and intellectually weakened ‘undead’ batter at Morgan’s house during the night; during the day, he searches them out and kills them with a stake, a sad activity he performs more as a duty than a matter of survival.
And then one day a dog appears. He analyzes its blood… and kills it. I think. In any case, the dog dies. This ambiguity, unintended I’m sure, is puzzling and deflating.
And then a woman appears in the daytime. She runs away, but he catches her and brings her back to his home to discover how she has survived. She is an emissary from another group of survivors who want to know if Morgan knows more than they.
Except it’s a lie. They want to kill Morgan. Why? It’s not clear. She claims they want to kill him because he has staked some of their undead family and friends, but that’s so unconvincing that it’s not worth discussing.
So the acting is OK, the script is inadequate but not laughable, the staging is good – I really believed it was an empty city – and the corpses of those caught in daylight are effectively underplayed. I really wanted to like this movie, but I didn’t. While the premise was worthy of attention, the conclusion was abrupt and unsatisfactory. I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend it.
