FANTASIA OBSCURA: Charlton Heston’s Own Take on Armageddon
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you really, really should just stop after the first one. Seriously, just sto — aw, dammit to hell!
The Omega Man (1971)
(Dist.: Warner Brothers, Dir.: Boris Sagal)
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a classic novel that had gotten an adaptation in 1964, The Last Man on Earth. The film did an effective job of conveying Matheson’s themes of how humanity struggles when facing grave challenges through a scenario that kept us engaged like a nightmare we dare not ignore.
What it didn’t do effectively, however, was find a wide enough audience. A few years after its release, Charlton Heston supposedly came across Matheson’s novel and started to put out the word that he’d love to be involved with an adaptation of the book, unaware of the first film’s existence. Whether he and the production crew that came together on the film actually did know about the first one or not, however, is immaterial, as the prospect of a big star putting his weight behind a potentially lucrative dream project can easily allow you to forget what you need to remember…
Once again, we find ourselves following the last survivor of a plague, Col. Robert Neville, MD (Heston), who has the whole world to himself, save for the plague victims who have been transformed into vampires Luddite albino mutants who belong to a cult, the Family, led by Mathias (Anthony Zerbe), a former anchorman. The Family feels Neville is harshing their mellow by insisting on holding onto things like guns, cars, electricity, and what-not, so they spend the nights they’re not staging book burnings and looting art museums trying to kill him and destroy his townhouse, a sweet, swinging clubhouse-cum-lab-and-arsenal.
Yeah, they took a few liberties with the book…
For one, our subject isn’t the tortured soul we’ve see from either Matheson or Vincent Price before. Heston’s Neville swaggers through his days with a lot of one-liners delivered quickly, without much time to let his loneliness overcome him. Even when things are supposed to seem dire, there’s just not enough riding on him to stand up to these challenges, as he’s got more than a few advantages being both a doctor and a soldier that give him a very “Marty-Stu” vibe that can’t be shaken.
He looks like he’s having too damn much fun being the last man on earth, save for his occasional longings for some carnal release. This allows his relationship with Lisa (Rosalind Cash), another survivor he meets, to move quickly from adversarial to romantic after some back and forth and her saving him from the Family in Dodger Stadium, assisted by fellow survivor Dutch (Paul Koslo), who stays out of the way while the leads get busy.
Cash’s Lisa is an interesting addition to the story that in later times might have earned her the right to helm the picture instead of Col. Neville. She’s adapted to surviving the post-apocalypse world better, without needing Neville’s action figure accessories that are lying around his bachelor pad. And as an African-American woman who suddenly has a world that kept her down now lying open in front of her, getting her perspective on the end of civilization would have made for a fascinating take. Instead, she ends up merely the love interest (which considering who she spends these scenes on screen with is still something of note for its time) who betrays her partner thanks to a convenient quirk in the way the plague operates, an act of Deus Ex Bacterium.
Another problem with the adaptation involves the disease itself. Instead being an unknowable pathogen capable of turning the survivors into monsters modeled on our deeper fears, the disease becomes a germ warfare weapon that was used in a Sino-Soviet conflict that got out of hand and instead turned survivors only into creepy targets for shooting with a submachine gun. In removing the mystery about the threat that horror relies on, it made it impossible for the audience to accept that the disease can just follow its own damn rules and do what it wants, which makes the twists in the plot harder to roll with.
The end result is a film that is less of a meditative horror like the book and the first adaptation were, and more of a funky action picture where a member of “Old Hollywood” had a playdate with talent and crew who took a break from their usual gigs on TV. Going for action in a somewhat empty Los Angeles (“somewhat” being an especially apt word, as in some of the long shots of the city you can see the crowds that were diverted away from the set), the viewer gets a film that’s so removed from the original as to be its own separate piece, which Matheson claimed he considered the film when asked about for years afterwards, while happily collecting the residuals he was owed at the same time.
So twice, Matheson’s classic novel got the big-screen treatment. The first time, we got an effort that stayed close to the spirit of the original work, and the second, not so much. Either way, after two serious approaches to the material, that should be the end of it, right?
Well-l-l-l-l-l, actually-y-y-y…
NEXT TIME: A tale of a little girl lost and the film she made despite dealing with that horror…
