Stars: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash

Director: Boris Sagal

Summary: The Omega Man is the last man alive in a biologically decimated future world. He crusades to keep himself alive and to fend off a diseased pack of neo-vampires...

In the aftermath of a bacteriological war, the future of mankind hangs in the balance. Only a chosen few have survived the mutating effects of germ warfare unharmed. A small enclave of healthy, stalwart resistors has formed a camp where, for the moment, they live peacefully. The other human survivors are terribly disfigured mutants referred to as the "Family" who walk the earth at night in search of prey. Charlton Heston plays the last man alive in this chilling classic, gathering supplies by day from a deserted Los Angeles whose streets are strewn with the post-apocalyptic flotsam of the super-funky '70s. Based on Richard Matheson's novel I AM LEGEND made before as THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964) with Vincent Price.

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

With its opening long shots of a car driving through the canyons of empty streets stirring up clouds of waste paper, Charlton Heston's 1971 film The Omega Manis an interesting precursor of more recent last-person-on-earth films such as 28 Days Later. Heston is surprisingly good at conveying the terror of being completely on your own, with sanity that wanders into long conversations with the inanimate. Rather less good are the film's antagonists, victims of bacterial warfare left as albino psychotics determined to destroy Heston as a representative of the old dead world of science and technology and a small group of the infected, but not yet changed, who live virtuous pastoral lives in the hills. The film's racial politics are interestingly dated: the heroine, Lisa, is black and has some wince-worthy moments of blaxploitation movie chic; the moment when she changes is nonetheless chilling for being eminently predictable. Loosely based on Richard Matheson's classic genre novel I Am Legend, perhaps the best thing about the film is that it comes from an era when science-fiction blockbusters could be relentlessly downbeat.

On the DVD:The Omega Mancomes to disc with some interesting special features. There's a television "making of" that was shown at the time, as well as the trailer and an interesting short retrospective documentary containing interviews with the surviving screenwriter Joyce Corrington and a couple of the younger actors. The anamorphic widescreen picture is fine, as is the digitally remastered mono sound. --Roz Kaveney

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Introduction - By Joyce H Carrington - Screenwriter, Featurette - 1. THE LAST MAN ALIVE: THE OMEGA MAN, 2. CHARLTON HESTON: SCIENCE FICTION LEGEND, Theatrical Trailers
Year:	1971
Release Date:	September 29, 2003
Runtime:	94 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 011210
Keywords:	Man, General, Fiction, Science, Omega, Horror, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Science Fiction