Horror october #4
Oct. 4th, 2017 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyA classic, then. I debated just how far back to go, for now I settled for 1971 and Omega Man: Charlton Heston as the last - or "last" - survivor of World War III, living alone in LA and hunting the mutants that rule the city by night.
For some reason I'd never seen this, even though I Am Legend is one of my favourite books (no, I haven't seen the Will Smith version, and I have no intention to). Where the book and the first movie (Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price) are very much products of the early cold war, this comes on the heels of the late 60s, post-Manson, and so the enemy comes from within. At one point, Heston's character even watches the Woodstock movie before retiring to his mancave where he's collected all the artifacts of Old Culture, to really hit home that this post-apocalyptic hell is the future that liberals want. Sort of. But while it does have a White Saviour streak a mile wide that runs very much counter to the whole point of the novel, and I'd take zombies over silly mutated cult members anyday, it's different enough that I can see it as its own beast, and it does have a good heart in there somewhere. A pity it drags for too much of the 96 minutes, though.
For some reason I'd never seen this, even though I Am Legend is one of my favourite books (no, I haven't seen the Will Smith version, and I have no intention to). Where the book and the first movie (Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price) are very much products of the early cold war, this comes on the heels of the late 60s, post-Manson, and so the enemy comes from within. At one point, Heston's character even watches the Woodstock movie before retiring to his mancave where he's collected all the artifacts of Old Culture, to really hit home that this post-apocalyptic hell is the future that liberals want. Sort of. But while it does have a White Saviour streak a mile wide that runs very much counter to the whole point of the novel, and I'd take zombies over silly mutated cult members anyday, it's different enough that I can see it as its own beast, and it does have a good heart in there somewhere. A pity it drags for too much of the 96 minutes, though.
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Date: 2017-10-05 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-06 05:39 am (UTC)