I suppose even the great ones can fail to deliver sometimes. Vincent Price is quite miscast as Robert Neville in this lame attempt at bringing Richard Matheson's novel to the big screen. There's clearly no budget for the scope of this story and the director simply doesn't have the vision. The production values just are not there.
With a global pandemic (!) resulting in dull-witted vampires spreading across every continent, the only uninfected human is Vincent Price who spends the days burning the dead and the nights brooding in his gloomy house while former colleagues thump on the walls and windows. There's really not much more to it than that and it feels very overwrought even at 86 minutes. Though I can see the same plot points developing in the same order as they did in The Omega Man seven years later in 1971 and I Am Legend thirty-six years after that in 2007. I wasn't too keen on Charton Heston's version but at least it had better world-building and felt more expansive.
This movie is set in the US but clearly shot in Italy (I recognise locations from Hudson Hawk) and Price is the only actor speaking English while the rest are speaking Italian with English very obviously dubbed on. I have no doubt that this movie could have been pulled off in 1964 but it needed a better director and a more fitting leading man. It's shot in black-and-white on 35mm in an obscure anamorphic format called "Totalscope" but there's not much in the way of dynamic framing or atmosphere. Colorized prints appear to be in a cropped 1.78:1 aspect ratio.
The Will Smith version is the best incarnation of this story, but they even managed to mess that up with the original theatrical cut being rather tepid.
With a global pandemic (!) resulting in dull-witted vampires spreading across every continent, the only uninfected human is Vincent Price who spends the days burning the dead and the nights brooding in his gloomy house while former colleagues thump on the walls and windows. There's really not much more to it than that and it feels very overwrought even at 86 minutes. Though I can see the same plot points developing in the same order as they did in The Omega Man seven years later in 1971 and I Am Legend thirty-six years after that in 2007. I wasn't too keen on Charton Heston's version but at least it had better world-building and felt more expansive.
This movie is set in the US but clearly shot in Italy (I recognise locations from Hudson Hawk) and Price is the only actor speaking English while the rest are speaking Italian with English very obviously dubbed on. I have no doubt that this movie could have been pulled off in 1964 but it needed a better director and a more fitting leading man. It's shot in black-and-white on 35mm in an obscure anamorphic format called "Totalscope" but there's not much in the way of dynamic framing or atmosphere. Colorized prints appear to be in a cropped 1.78:1 aspect ratio.
The Will Smith version is the best incarnation of this story, but they even managed to mess that up with the original theatrical cut being rather tepid.