Charlton Heston plays a military scientist named Robert Neville who survives a plague unleashed by biological weapons in a war between Russia and China by injecting himself with an experimental vaccine. Two years later, he is alone in Los Angeles, where he barricades himself into an apartment complex at night to avoid the monsters he hunts during the day. The vampires from the original novel have been replaced with some sort of light-sensitive albino mutants, who taunt Neville by burning books outside his apartment at night. The albinos have formed a bizarre Luddite cult, the “Family,” who believe the plague was a punishment for the excesses of science. Neville is slowly losing his mind, which is illustrated in a brilliant scene where he walks out of a movie theater and hears every phone in the city start ringing. His paranoia, combined with his ongoing conflict with the Family, is brought to a head when he discovers a group of plague-resistant survivors and one of them is abducted by the Family. The movie just barely scratches the surface of some interesting themes like Neville losing his mind, or the morality of whether to “cure” the albinos. The conclusion to the film felt a bit rushed, and it climaxes with a heavy-handed religious allegory, but all in all I was impressed by the hidden depths this movie had to offer. If you can get past albino mutants wearing sunglasses and monks’ habits, you might enjoy it. The opening scene of Heston driving a sports car through an abandoned Los Angeles is worth the price of the rental alone.

This review is the first in a four-part series reviewing Richard Matheson’s novelI am Legend, and the three movies that have been made based on it: Vincent Price’sThe Last Man on Earth, Charlton Heston’sThe Omega Man, and Will Smith’sI am Legend.