In association with

The Omega Man [1972]
from Warner Home Video
starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash, Paul Koslo, Eric Laneuville
directed by Boris Sagal

Features:

• PAL

Editorial Review:

Science fiction took a grim turn in the 1970s--the heyday of Agent Orange, nuclear peril and Watergate. Suddenly, most of our possible futures took on a "last man on Earth" flavour, with The Omega Man topping the doom-struck heap.

Charlton Heston plays the government researcher behind the ultimate biological weapon, a deadly plague that has ravaged humanity. There are two groups of survivors: a dwindling band of immune humans and an infected, psychopathic mob of light-hating quasi-vampires. The infected are led by Mathias, a clever, charismatic man set on destroying the last remnants of the civilisation that produced the plague. Heston has a vaccine--but he and the few remaining normals are outnumbered and outgunned. By day, he builds a makeshift version of the nuclear family (with Rosalind Cash as his afro-wearing, gun-toting little lady). They plan for the future while roaming freely through an empty urban landscape, taking what few pleasures life has left. By night, they defend themselves against the growing horde of plague victims. Both a bittersweet romance and a gothic cautionary tale, The Omega Man paints a convincing portrait of hope and despair. It ain't pretty, but it's a great movie. --Grant Balfour

With its opening long shots of a car driving through the canyons of empty streets stirring up clouds of waste paper, Charlton Heston's 1971 film The Omega Man is an interesting precursor of more recent last-person-on-earth films such as 28 Days Later. Heston is surprisingly good at conveying the terror of being completely on your own, with sanity that wanders into long conversations with the inanimate. Rather less good are the film's antagonists, victims of bacterial warfare left as albino psychotics determined to destroy Heston as a representative of the old dead world of science and technology and a small group of the infected, but not yet changed, who live virtuous pastoral lives in the hills. The film's racial politics are interestingly dated: the heroine, Lisa, is black and has some wince-worthy moments of blaxploitation movie chic; the moment when she changes is nonetheless chilling for being eminently predictable. Loosely based on Richard Matheson's classic genre novel I Am Legend, perhaps the best thing about the film is that it comes from an era when science-fiction blockbusters could be relentlessly downbeat.

On the DVD: The Omega Mancomes to disc with some interesting special features. There's a television "making of" that was shown at the time, as well as the trailer and an interesting short retrospective documentary containing interviews with the surviving screenwriter Joyce Corrington and a couple of the younger actors. The anamorphic widescreen picture is fine, as is the digitally remastered mono sound. --Roz Kaveney

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• A pleasant surprise...
  I remember watching this film as a teenager and it certainly has stuck in my mind over the years. It was with a little trepidation that I rented it - would I be disappointed? I was pleasantly surprised to find, that despite the awful soundtrack, the Omega Man was just as I remembered it.
  A thought provoking, science fiction thriller with, for once, a great ending. Watch it now!

• Fantastic thriller but a bit dated
  
  This is a great film, from the brilliant and creepy first scenes I was drawn straight in to the peculiar experience of the last man alive. I felt that after the beginning when the bad guys are revealed and made more human some of the tension went out of the film but there are enough good scenes after that to keep you interested and all through there is a brilliant suggestion of what it's like to live in an empty world and some investigation of the effects it might have on you. I noticed that in the... more info

• Not keen
  I don't know what I was expecting from this film but I didn't quite get it I'm afraid....maybe it's because I've read the book and was thinking of the book too much whilst watching the film.
  I found myself watching the time on my dvd player tbh....wanted to like it but wasn't keen unfortunately.

• Early 70s pre-cursor to 28 Days Later
  Interest may be re-kindled in this 70s apocalyptic sci-fi because of the new film based on the same book, I Am Legend.
  Weapons of mass destruction have destroyed the civilised world, now home to Charlton Heston, last remnant of humanity, and 'The Family', a band of beings mutated by germ warfare, now on a mission "to erase history from the time that machines and weapons threatened more than they offered".
  Though I hadn't even heard of this film until I saw it for sale, I hoped it would be good.... more info

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