Omega Man, The (HD DVD)

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OK, what do you think? Is it just coincidence that Warner Bros. are issuing the 1971 sci-fi adventure "The Omega Man" on HD DVD and Blu-ray at almost the same time they're releasing their newest remake of the Richard Matheson novel, "I Am Legend," with Will Smith to theaters? And do oil companies make a profit, or is that coincidental, too?

The first movie version of Matheson's book, "The Last Man on Earth" with Vincent Price, came along in 1964. So now connoisseurs of the subject have three screen adaptations of the story to argue about, although I must confess that I didn't care all that much for any of them. Guess I'm not a connoisseur.

Still, you can't blame a studio for trying. WB even include "Movie Money" in each keep case for "The Omega Man" (including their latest standard-definition re-release, I might add), worth up to $7.00 toward the purchase of a theater ticket to the Will Smith account. The studio wants to get you coming and going, but if you really like "The Omega Man," you can't go wrong getting practically a free ticket (if you go to a bargain matinee) to the newer film, too.

So, let's get on with the show. "The Omega Man" begins with absolutely no fanfare. It starts right in with Charlton Heston as a former military scientist, Col. Robert Neville, riding around a deserted Los Angeles in a red convertible and stopping to fire an automatic weapon at persons (or things) he sees moving in nearby buildings. Then a phone rings. That's actually a scary moment, and I liked the opening, its getting right to the point the way it does. How the world came to be deserted, leaving Neville practically alone, the film tells us later in flashbacks.

Unfortunately, from the opening sequence on, the movie goes downhill, an adventure with little adventure, a thriller with few thrills, but a movie with a whole lot of talk.

It's the second year of a plague that has wiped out most of the world's population, the result of biological warfare gone very, very wrong. Neville finds himself immune because he helped to develop an experimental serum that worked on him but which he never had the chance to use on others. Good luck for Neville; bad luck for Mankind. The only other survivors he knows about are mutants, people affected by the disease who haven't died yet but cannot see in the light and, thus, only come out after dark. Apparently, the disease not only affected these mutants physically, it affected them mentally as well, because they now blindly follow and obey a mutant guru, a quasi-religious leader named Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who teaches them to hate Neville as the symbolic survivor of a corrupt world that destroyed them all. What's more, the mutants all wear black hoods and robes, which they evidently found in one of L.A.'s notorious black-hood-and-robe shops, and they all behave mindlessly, sort of like Red and Blu fans at a format convention.

Most of the story moves along at a crawl, with a horrendous musical track that almost single-handedly destroys any atmosphere the film tries to create. Worse, the film has a kind of made-for-television feel to it, despite its being shot largely on location. Maybe the fact that its director, Boris Sagal, did most of his work for television before and after this production contributes to the lackadaisical end result. People in the film just chatter at each other most of the time, with virtually no development of tension or suspense and little imagination in the camera angles, the lighting, the set decoration, or anything else that might have distinguished the proceedings.

Heck, we don't even learn anything about the characters other than that they're in a tight predicament, so we can hardly feel sympathetic toward them, particularly not toward Neville because he seems so distant and cold. Part of this might be Heston's rather distant acting style, which tends to be more wooden than communicative, but mainly the fault's in the script, which gives him little to do other than wander around the city by day and shoot a few mutants by night.