starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
screenplay by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the unusual

I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson
directed by Boris Sagal

Its dialogue and score at constant war with the tickle of poignancy threatening to justify

The Omega Man

's cult status, Boris Sagal's at times astonishingly awful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic short novel

I Am Legend

is some kind of weird hippie elegy spiced with a few disturbing religious images and a lot of casual racism. The idea that Matheson's vampires are now black-hooded (monastic and judicial) albino mutants living in an abandoned civic building, representative of not a new order but the oppressive old, is too clearly a lament for the doom of the flower-power generation. Frankly, the image of broken-down hippies trying to plant seeds in blasted earth in the middle of

Easy Rider

said it all with more elegance and brevity.

Neville (Charlton Heston) survives an earth-clearing plague, wandering the empty streets of Los Angeles, cuing up endless screenings of

Woodstock

at the local cinema, and picking out fresh ugly jumpsuits when the old ones get a little sweaty. Once night falls, "The Family" crawls out of the woodwork; led by charismatic Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who's fond of the prosaic monologue delivered in a hepcat-ese that must have seemed dated hours after the picture's 1971 release, they abhor the technology that has laid mankind low. The Family emerges after dark because light hurts them–of course, this doesn't explain why they carry around torches, nor does it explain why their lair is illuminated by what appears to be electric light. It's a blind person in a community of blind people taking the time to put light bulbs in their lamps–to have lamps at all. The details are not the point, one assumes (or more attention would have been paid them), and as allegory the picture suggests that the only cure for a black man is the blood of a white man–shades of Eugenics and the idea that ethnicity can and should be "bred out" over time.

After two years of relative isolation, Neville encounters a commune of survivors headed up by saucy Lisa (Rosalind Cash), the prototype for the Pam Grier blaxploitation heroines and some sort of space alien who delivers her every line with a convincing lack of life. After a passionate night of the love that dare not speak its name, Lisa dreams of a river full of fish to which Neville cracks wise, "Where did you ever see a river in Harlem?" Not funny anyway, Neville's presumption that Lisa is from Harlem (the film is set in L.A., you see) is the sort of racial shorthand that locates all Arabs in Baghdad, all Asians in Shanghai, and all Caucasians in Appalachia. Earlier, the only black member of The Family refers to Neville's stronghold as "that Honky Paradise"–later, this same character breaks the Amish dictums of the cult by packing heat. No surprise that he pays the ultimate price, while Lisa and young Black man Richie (Eric Laneuville) are saved by an injection of Neville's life-giving plasma. Insulting at best, the picture seems dedicated to undermining the good will wrought by its interracial coupling. Disturbingly, we haven't really come all that far from this, it's just that

The Omega Man

is less cunning about its presentation.

Neville is in the Christ-posture throughout, his spilt blood the salvation of mankind, a spear in his side, a grail catching his vitreous humours, arms outstretched in hollow emulation of someone else's crucifixion… It's not the obviousness of

The Omega Man

that grates, but the indecisiveness of its presentation: the shakiness of its premise ultimately obscuring its message. The middle film of Heston's sci-fi trilogy (preceded by


Planet of the Apes


, followed by

Soylent Green

),

The Omega Man

is easily the worst in terms of scripting, scoring (composer Ron Grainer, like Sagal, spent most of his career in television), internal cohesion, and thematic tightness. It may seem nitpicking to note that a harangue by Matthias about the evils of "the wheel" is preceded by the dramatic wheeling in of a giant catapult, The Family's secret weapon–but it's not nitpicking because it doesn't take a particularly observant person to note the discrepancy. It isn't the datedness of the picture (films like

Silent Running

,

Logan's Run

, and Heston's other two sci-fi operas are dated, too, after all), it's the slackness of the picture. All the pretentious nothings of the piece spill over into a rather low opinion of its audience.

A relic of its time and a little sad for it,

The Omega Man

arrives on DVD in a roomy 2.35:1 anamorphic video transfer that preserves the Panavision dimensions of its native source. Sadly, Sagal is weaned imperfectly of the small screen, leading to a series of compositions that could be panned-and-scanned without much loss of important visual information. A few wide shots of abandoned La La Land benefit most from the letterboxing, which, aside from a little "filmic" graininess now and again, looks remarkably good for a picture pushing thirty-four. The Dolby 1.0 mono audio track is notable for its clarity and its sadistic fidelity in assaulting us with Grainer's score and the finer points of John and Joyce Corrington's legendarily awful screenplay. Interesting to note, by the by, two ironic convergences: the first morbid in that Sagal, later killed in a helicopter crash, filmed a rather detailed helicopter crash for this picture; the second probably intentional in the homage paid

The Omega Man

by Matt Groening's "Futurama" and its legion of black-hooded CHUD mutants, of which Leela, voiced by Sagal's daughter Katey, is the most successful exile.

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The disc provides a few mildly interesting special features, beginning with a brief "introduction" to the film by actors Laneuville and Paul Koslo and screenwriter Joyce Corrington that plays like a B-roll promo doc three decades after the fact. Corrington is the most grating in her assiduous listing of her résumé: "I have a PhD in Chemistry and my husband had a PhD in English, so Neville is a distillation of both of us," and, "I must say it was my idea to make [Lisa] black–you see, I was teaching at a black college back then." Yet for all her self-congratulation, the fact remains that when you approach an interracial love story as the main conflict of your piece–no matter the time (and I indict, here, the pabulum of

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?–

the answer to which is "an accountant, apparently"), you're engaged in a sort of paternalistic racism that can't help but offend. More, her offhand dismissal of Matheson's source material, already evident in the base product, is reiterated here with a callous arrogance that speaks more to Corrington's intelligence than her proudly-worn post-grad ever could. Probably realizing that they had something uniquely unsavoury here with Corrington (and fawningly useless in Koslo/Laneuville), Warner wisely decided against enlisting them for a full-length commentary track; at four minutes, the piece is already too long, truth be told.

A contemporary "making of" called "The Last Man Alive" (10 mins.) refers to "The Family" as "The Others"–cementing the peculiar racial aspect of the film; an "essay" on "Charlton Heston – Science-Fiction Legend" is about five scrollable pages of poorly-written and uninformative text, while a nicely put-together theatrical trailer and cast & crew filmographies round out the platter.

-



Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Dominant; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in chiefly, without the express agree to of its novelist.



Buy at

Amazon USA

Buy at

Amazon Canada


DVD


GRADES


:


Icon


A-


Prudent


B

Extras


D


DVD


VITALS:


Running Age

98 minutes

MPAA

PG

Aspect Ratio(s)

English Mono,
French Mono

CC

Yes

Subtitles

English, French, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Warner
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What's coming out on DVD? Check the

release calendar


Published: September 1, 2003

:

The third film continues where the second one left off. Reggie and Mike (Michael Baldwin reprising the role once more) are still living on the road, cruising down one long and lonely highway after the other in Reggie’s Cuda in search of the Tall Man and in hopes of putting a stop to him once and for all.

Our heroes are able to follow his trail pretty easily, as he leaves rather large calling cards in his wake, namely complete and utter destruction. The towns he has made his way through are nothing more than empty husks, ghost towns even, and not a single living soul is left save for one small boy living alone in the house where he and his parents once lived before the Tall Man took them from him. Much like Mike in the first film, this tough little guy knows how to fend for himself and he too wants to make the Tall Man pay for what he did. Throw a sassy black lady named Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry who pops up briefly in The Devil’s Advocate) with a penchant for beating her opponents into submission with her nunchaku and you’ve got yourself quite a team.

This time out, Coscarelli concentrates as much on the horror as he does on the action and the results are a stronger storyline that continues more along the lines of the tradition setup in the first movie than in the second. There’s still plenty of action in here and more than a few characters who show up to serve as nothing more than cannon fodder for the Tall Man and his spheres. The last half of the film and the abundance of supernatural elements bring this one to a much more surreal playing field than the second movie and it falls somewhere in between the first and the second film in terms of quality and in terms of scares.

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Plenty of gore and make up effects keep things interesting and a few atmospheric touches, such as the kid in the clown mask roaming the secret passage ways of his empty home guarding it from intruders, make this an interesting watch. Bannister is in fine form here, bringing a bit more personality to his character and giving us a bit more character development to chew on as the movie plays out. Another ‘Reggie Bannister Love Scene’ (a film phenomena equaled only by the patented ‘Don The Dragon’ Wilson Love Scene’ in that it’s completely ridiculous and more than a little too long and it features a man who would never score with a lady of this caliber outside of the movies!) adds some humor which he handles well but he’s also quite at home in the action scenes here.

Bringing Michael Baldwin back to support him was a wise casting choice – he’s the real Mike in the Phantasm films and having him back in the role he made only helps the film in the end. The highlights of the film are, of course, those in which Scrimm is given opportunity to shine in his signature role. While the script and some of the supporting performances aren’t going to make any new friends, Scrimm is as strong as always as the Tall Man and whenever he’s on screen the movie shines. Throw in a few good gore set pieces and plenty of flying sphere drill thing action and you’ve got a decent time killer with some fun moments and enjoyably disturbing murder set pieces.

Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) and Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes) are an inappropriate tandem of basketball hustlers. They link up up to con their way across the courts of Los Angeles, playing a game that’s close on, dangerous, and funny.

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Ahead of Vietnam, there was Indochina; before the Americans, the French. The languorous essential half of Wargnier’s epic true Gothic is charming much as you’d keep in view: plantation-owner Deneuve in impeccably starched jodhpurs, coolies in their place, civilisation transplanted to a hothouse. She begins a passionate romance with a young naval officer (Perez), but he falls in love with her adopted Vietnamese daughter (Linh Dan Pham). When he is sent to a remote outpost on the Gulf of Tonkin, the girl takes after him. And Wargnier follows. Midway through, having involved us so deeply in colonial eagerness, he abruptly cuts our cultural ties and plunges into decisive revolutionary tradition: the lovers go on the run, the girl discovers her people, their strife, what her role must be. If Bertolucci tried his surrender at a mini-series, it would probably look something like this. The allegorical intimations may not be in toto credible, assumption the piece’s lush romanticism; it’s rather enervatingly composed; and the pacing could certainly be tighter. But such grand old-fashioned melodrama is almost as non-native as the stunning Vietnamese landscape; it’s amiable to be seduced by it.

A wildcat of a smokescreen guaranteed to revolt even jaded viewers, Claudio Assis’ debut facet «Mango Yellow» is a provocative tale of low-rent losers set in the coastal town of Recife, Brazil. Like characters thoroughly of some Carnival hell, a macho butcher and his born-again wife, a forlorn barmaid, a sinister sadist and the gay manager of a flophouse called the Hotel Texas generate in and not on of each other’s lives in a film as sloppy, sluttish, scruffy and vital as they are. Conceding that pic struggles to reach a message beyond its own unsettle value, it has the variety of in-your-coat transgressiveness that should inclined the bill at festivals looking for original Brazilian fare.

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As storefronts open and people pour out onto the street on a typical Recife morning, sexy but lonely waitress Daisy (Leona Cavalli) slips on a minidress and nothing else to start serving in a bar. Her lack of underwear will be recalled in an eye-opening scene much later in the film.

Flamboyant Dunga (Matheus Nachtergaele) revs up the Hotel Texas, among whose colorful band of misfits is a nasty foreigner named Isaac (Jonas Bloch). His hobby, illustrated in a graphic scene, is shooting corpses. Lusty Wellington (Chico Diaz), who works in a gruesome slaughterhouse — that will put many viewers off meat for a while — loves his dignified wife Kika (Dira Paes) but can’t resist the tawdry Daisy.

Dunga has a hopeless crush on the muscular Wellington and maneuvers to break up his marriage. Kika, who has turned to an evangelical cult to find meaning in her life, suddenly wakes up to the fact that she’s been dead inside for years, especially sexually.

Like a practiced barman, Assis mixes and stirs his characters around in their slummy but familiar surroundings. He gets much closer to them than most filmmakers shooting in Brazil’s shanty towns, who concentrate on crimes perpetrated against those on the outside. Here the people relate strictly to each other. If not for a few shots of tall buildings on the skyline, one would never know another class existed in Recife.

Mango yellow is both the jaundiced shade of their broken dreams and, when Kika cuts and dyes her long black hair in the last scene, the color is of nonconformity and feeling alive.

In this world of desperate eccentrics looking for happiness, pro actor Nachtergaele is a standout as the emotionally over-endowed Dunga, all flailing arms and neurotic efficiency. He embodies the film’s savage over-the-topness without flattening out as some of the other characters do.

Shot in revealing widescreen by top Brazilian lenser Walter Carvalho («Central Station») on a proverbial shoestring, scenes have raw vitality and a violent up-closeness to the characters. Renata Pinheiro’s sets, which reach their peak at the Hotel Texas, are littered with a lot to look at and underscored by a loud, strong music beat put together by Lucio Maia and Jorge Du Peixe.

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Si l'on surmise aisément le petit budget avec lequel fut réalisé le film (estimé à 3 millions de dollars) et compte tenu donc du peu de moyen à arrangement, la facture générale demeure honnête. On …

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Il en va plus ou moins de même avec le traitement sonore. Les pistes Dolby Digital 5.1 anglaise et française ne font pas de vagues mais compte tenu du matériau d'origine, il ne fallait pas s'attendre …

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Les bonus du dvd proposent increased by de 25 scènes coupées fendardes qui parviennent à rehausser les quelques faiblesses du film d'origine avec quelques élans gores plutôt réjouissants. On s'amusera …

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05 octobre 2009

Un "smash cut" est un technique de montage consistant en une transition abrupte entre deux scènes. Désormais, ce sera aussi le nom d'une lettre d'amour -écrite dans le sang- envoyée à Herschell …

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18 novembre 2006
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Créé par les cinéastes Eli Roth, Scott Speigel et Boaz Yakin, la compagnie de distribution Raw Nerve a pour but de produire des films d'horreur cauchemardesques propre à booster le trouillomètre et …

A dejected meditation on urban blight and inner-city decrepitude, «Urbanscapes» occasionally undercuts its own purpose by offering harshly minimalist, meticulously framed images — underscored by everything from Mozart and Bach to Eminem and Motown — that achieve, almost perversely, a stark, stripped-to-essentials splendor. Despite that seeming contradiction — or maybe because of it — pic by husband-and-wife documakers Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo could generate little hammy interest before relocating to more hospitable TV neighborhoods.

With equal measures of sorrow and simmering rage, the Italian-born, U.S.-based helmers focus on parts of Detroit, Chicago, Newark and the South Bronx that have, through happenstance or design, devolved into dilapidation.

In the Highland Park section of Detroit, auto worker Gen. Gordon Baker sadly notes the widespread unemployment and urban decay caused by plant closings, and rails against officials who he feels bankrupted his city, leaving citizens without adequate public services.

Marion, his social-worker wife, bitterly recalls so-called «urban renewal» programs of the 1960s that seemed designed only to displace low-income African-Americans.

Photographer Mel Rosenthal sounds a similarly cynical note when he returns to his old neighborhood in the South Bronx, an area that became «an international metaphor for urban disaster» in the 1970s and ’80s. Rosenthal blames many of the problems on a city government-sanctioned policy of «planned shrinkage.»

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Another photographer, New York-based Camillo J. Vergara, speaks of what he has observed during 30 years of taking photos of specific neighborhoods in Chicago and Newark. (In this, he often sounds like Harvey Keitel’s obsessive street-corner photographer in Wayne Wang’s «Smoke.») But his most powerful pics appear in a gallery exhibit of his many photos of the World Trade Center — including some he snapped on 9/11.

Two scenes remain in the mind long after the closing credits. As the Bakers drive through the decayed magnificence of a once-popular Chicago movie house that has been turned into a parking garage, the image is borderline surreal.

At another point, Rosenthal remembers seeing wild dogs running through the streets of the South Bronx, pursued by men brandishing lassos. Rosenthal found himself thinking: «Could this really be a city in the United States?»

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Clint Eastwood («Play Misty For Me»/»High Plains Drifter»/»Pale Rider»)
directs, in his third directorial effort (now directing over two dozen
films), this preposterous personal film; it’s a May – December romance
story between a jaded and dour middle-aged square, Frank Harmon (William
Holden), and a free-spirited kooky hippie teenager with a good-heart named
Breezy (Kay Lenz) who is living on the poverty line for the last three
months after graduating high school. Breezy is adjusting to life as an
orphan by being into free love, as we soon learn that her folks died in
a traffic accident a few years ago and she was raised by her aunt back
in Pennsylvania. It plays out as a sappy meeting between representatives
of the Counterculture and Establishment, in which each is shown to be equally
shallow and in need of love and direction to straighten out their messed
up lives. That this unlikely romance seems possible at all, must be credited
to the skillful direction of Eastwood who takes Jo Heims’ muddled screenplay
(though the dialogue is fine) over a bumpy ride to avoid most of its pitfalls.
Unfortunately there are too many pitfalls to elude all of them.

The film opens with the amiable guitar-carrying hippie Breezy leaving
the hippie Bruno, her one-night stand, to hitch a ride to the Valley. She’s
picked up by a middle-aged leering well-dressed man who soon attempts to
rape her but she uses her street smarts to escape his unwanted advances.
Breezy lands near the exclusive secluded property of the prosperous Frank
Harmon, a divorced real-estate broker who is unhappy in dating women in
his own age group and social class. The chatterbox, living drug-free in
California for the last three months (which might be the hardest thing
about this film to digest), manages to talk her way into getting a ride
with the reluctant and grumpy Frank into Hollywood. But the two have a
difference over saving a stray dog laying by the side of the road that
was hit by a car and part ways. Frank decides to do a good deed when Breezy
is gone, and leaves the dog off at the vet for medical treatment. Breezy
returns that night to pick up the guitar she left in Frank’s car. When
she takes a shower and shows him her sweet melons and bun, it’s all over
for him worrying about the fact that he’s more than twice her age and in
a scene or two later they’re in the sack. The rejuvenated Frank tries to
make a go of this unseemly relationship, but they have so little in common
and his friends give him the evil eye that all the attempts to make this
romance last for a year seem like a reach; nevertheless it’s what this
flick reaches for.

The film is pretty to look at and the heroine is appealing, but it
had little impact on me; its broad humor and conventional stereotyped take
on hippies, and its ironical pronouncements on all relationships seemed
like a mixture of sour grapes and an older male’s sexual fantasy of scoring
a younger uninhibited chick with big boobs. Though it makes for a pleasant
lighthearted watch, living up to its title, as it manages to deliver a
few delights in its take on such an inappropiate and unbelievable relationship—it
still never makes it believable. It sits as not one of Eastwood’s better
films—even if he has said in interviews it’s one of his favorites.

It’s the first film that the action-oriented Clint Eastwood directed
in which he did not star and his light comedy romantic sensitivity theme
is much different from the way one usually perceives an Eastwood film,
which may be a reason the crowds stayed away.

Attack U.S.A.

Director:


Joseph Zito

We can all sleep easy with Chuck 'Neanderthal' Norris to mind the free world single-handed from the commie guerrilla import that attempts

Aggression U.S.A.

A machine-pistol hanging at each hip, Norris blasts his way through an raid might that blows up innocent class homes as the occupants prepare concerning Christmas. Terrorists disguised as Miami cops, they exterminate crowds of Hispanics, place bombs in hypermarkets, and usually sow the seeds in spite of the street warfare that will sap the fabric of democracy. Norris, who doesn't so much act as underscore his beard at the camera, weaves his way through so many explosions that the money saved on the squint was obviously blown on pyrotechnics. Leaden, xenophobic, and utterly stupid, it's far more nauseating than

Rambo

and here less spring executed.

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Little Sheba is a dog that’s gone AWOL, and its owner, Shirley Booth, has also devastated her looks and her love. She’s married to a reformed alcoholic (Lancaster), and has a lodger (Moore) whose incessant bonking with Richard Jaeckel drives Burt remote to the booze and Stall into self-feel. Dated now, it’s yet a classic slice of ’50s Americana, based on a play by William Inge and treading gracefully between tragedy and comedy. But unlike Ass, it doesn’t score heavily as a movie. Daniel Mann refuses to get wrong his tripod, and the camera seems transfixed by Booth’s screen debut (she had played the part on Broadway), which won her an Oscar and the Cannes prize.