- Directors: Ubaldo Ragona, Sidney Salkow
- Writers: Richard Matheson, William F. Leicester
- Stars: Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 26 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3vGBO97
Synopsis
We begin with many shots of empty streets and abandoned buildings. There are dead people in the streets, just laying out in the open. Dr. Robert Morgan wakes up, and he is “the last man on Earth.” It’s December 1965, three years after the plague hit. He goes out to the garage to refill his generators and finds a few dead bodies outside his door. We see that he has crosses and garlic nailed to his front door. He fires up the ham radio, makes coffee, and checks out his food stores. He looks like the ultimate “prepper.”
“I’ve got to find where they hide in the day,” he mutters. There’s more than half the city he hasn’t searched. He turns his own vampire-killing stakes on his lathe. He packs up his stakes and goes hunting. Morgan dumps the dead bodies in a pit and burns them. Then he finds some live ones, and he drives stakes through their hearts just like any other vampire. He explains that most of his days are like this.
Morgan goes to the crypt where his dead wife is buried. He goes to sleep there and when he wakes up, it’s already dark. He fights off some vampires heading to the car; fortunately, they are slow moving like zombies, and he gets past him. Morgan fights his way into the house, past one zombie that keeps calling his name. Morgan does eventually get home without too much risk.
We get a flashback of Morgan’s daughter Cathy’s birthday party. Virginia is there, and so is Ben, who we recognize as one of the zombies who still hangs around Morgan’s house today. The adults talk about the new page and how it doesn’t behave like a normal disease. We then fast-forward a bit to see both Virginia and Cathy are sick, and things progress badly from there. Morgan forbids Virginia from calling a doctor for Cathy; that would be a disaster. Morgan goes to work, but there’s no one left to research the disease. When he returns home, they are loading Cathy’s corpse into a truck; Virginia relented and called the doctor, and they took her away. When Virginia finally dies, he buries her out in the field. That night, she comes to his door and whispers, “let me in.”
The next morning, Morgan spots a dog; a live dog. He chases it and finds bodies that have been staked, but not by him. There’s another hunter out here somewhere. Between the dog and excitement about the new hunter, Morgan starts getting hopeful. He examines the dog’s blood, and it’s infected too; he buries it the next morning. As he buries the dog, he sees a woman walking outside— in the daylight! He takes her home with him. Her name is Ruth.
She seems normal, but she cringes away from the garlic. He thinks she’s infected, but she says she’s just in shock. Morgan explains that he was once bitten on the neck by a bat in Panama, and he thinks that may have given him immunity. Ruth is taking an injection that keeps her from changing. “There are quite a number of us,” she says. Her group wants to rebuild society, but they see Morgan as a murdering monster. “You’re a legend in the city, leading bloodless corpses behind you. Many of those people were still alive!”
Her people are coming after him tonight to kill him. She was sent as a distraction. She passes out, and Morgan does a blood transfusion between the two of them. When she wakes up, she is cured. His blood is the cure.
Of course, this is the time when Ben breaks in the front door and grabs Ruth. Many men with guns drive up and kill all the vampires in the area including Ben. The men spot Morgan and chase him through the neighborhood. They trade gunfire, and Morgan goes to the police armory, where he gets bigger guns. He gets shot and staggers into a church, where he finally dies. Ruth tells the others, “We’re all safe now.”
Commentary
I like that it spends so much time on his equipment at home, where he gets gas and food, and the details of his survival as the only human in town. The lighting and direction here are very much like “Night of the Living Dead” which came out a few years after this one, but was obviously influenced by this.
This has been remade twice, but I still think this is the best of the three.