But he’s completely and utterly alone, empty, and on the verge of losing his mind. The first portion of the film features only Heston, as he tools around an abandoned LA, machine-gunning mutants and watching the same movie over and over and over again. Robert NevilleDirected by TV vet Boris Sagal, The Omega Man can be seen now as a huge influence on the post-apocalyptic genre. The teeth-gritting star was going through his sci-fi phase at the time, having already done one and a half Planet of the Apes movies before making a stopover in desolate Los Angeles as the Omega Man, and then heading off to discover that Soylent Green is people in 1973. Coming just seven years after Last Man on Earth, the film was a full-on Hollywood production, released by Warner Bros. But The Omega Man, well… that was a different beast entirely. And without Night, there would be no Dawn of the Dead, or the scores of zombie films and comics and stories that followed… like The Walking Dead. Hands grasping through boarded up windows are replicated almost to the exact shot, while the bleak ending of Night also tracks with the Price film. Night of the Living Dead director George Romero was heavily influenced by I Am Legend and The Last Man on Earth.Looking at Last Man on Earth alongside Romero’s film, which came four years later, it’s clear that the shambling, corpse-like figures that creep around outside Neville’s house were a direct inspiration for Night of the Living Dead. Which, of course, was the kick-off point for the entire zombie genre as we know it today. Still, both the book and the Price film’s influence have become obvious in the years since, with director George Romero even citing them as a major inspiration for his zombie classic Night of the Living Dead. The first film version of I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth, came a decade later with Vincent Price starring, but the low-budget, Italian-made production was not well received upon release. He’s the sole unaffected survivor of a plague that wiped out most of mankind, with the only other remaining people having been transformed into vampire-like creatures that hunt Neville every night - just as he hunts them while they sleep during the day. Play The 1954 book told the lonely tale of Robert Neville.
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