The Last Man on Earth

I watched this Vincent Price flick the other day. Marie bought the DVD for me years ago from Target for a couple bucks or something.

The Last Man on Earth is cool because it's totally the inspiration for Night of the Living Dead. Buuuuuuuuut it's not that good. NotLD is amazing. It's groundbreaking. TLMoE is just alright. 

The thing I actually really liked about The Last Man on Earth was the fact it was shot in Italy. I knew it was Italy immediately because of the iconic Brutalist architecture. I was first turned on to the aesthetic by Antonioni's films such as L'Eclisse and L'Avventura. Those monolithic concrete structures just seemed so fucking HEAVY. So futuristic. It was like a dystopian Jetsons. Somehow it was clearly from the future, yet we're talking early 1960's. No flying cars. No Rosy the Robot.

So anyway, the fact that I found inanimate concrete structures to be the start of the show tells you something...

The zombies are interesting, too, from a film history perspective. They can talk. The walk slow and they moan. But they can talk. They still have memory. You rarely see that depicted other than the obligatory, "Braaaaaaaiiiiinsssss." So that was neat.

Oh, the continuity issues are fucking awful in this flick. There're numerous scenes where Price is driving somewhere in broad daylight then it cuts and it's pitch black then it cuts back and it's daylight again. Or dusk. Price's car even switches from a left hand drive to a right hand drive and back. So yeah, that kind of attention to detail is pretty lacking. The whole day/night/day thing was ridiculous.

Watch it if you're a horror completist. Otherwise, maybe watch a Stranger Things episode again.