Lame. Fans of Richard Matheson’s classic novel, I Am Legend, and cheesy, early 70s horror may want to see this flick. It’s not a faithful adaptation, though. Outside of a few striking moments (the early bits where Chuck Heston drives around a deserted L.A., and a post-transformation scene later on), the whole enterprise wafts by on a slow-moving breeze of banal lighting, glib, at times trite, dialogue, and (worst of all) inoffensive, ineffective scares. Heston doesn’t sell the desperation, the despair, at the heart of his character; and the vampires of the novel are here a glitter-robed cult of albinos, strangely unable to register much of a threat until the end of the film, by which time something has to give and the movie cheats on the basic imbalance between good guy and bad.
Joe Keaton
Weird tales for the late crowd. And riffs on pop culture.
