I Am Legend (2007), The Omega Man (1971), The Last Man on Earth (1964)

How about three movies for the price of one? Why not? After all, they are all the same movie. The plot goes something like this: Earth is ravaged by a terrible plague that kills most of the planet's inhabitants. Those it doesn't kill, it turns into flesh-eating zombies who fear the sunlight. Only one man is immune to the plague - a doctor who struggles to find a cure for those who are already zombified. He lives in a fortified house to keep the zombies from eating him before he can come up with a cure for this dreadful disease. Eventually, he meets a young woman who appears to be immune also. They get real friendly, on account of the fact that neither of them has seen another human for a long time. Just as the doctor is completing his research, the zombies attack. He's killed in the attack, but not before he gives the serum that will cure humanity to the young woman and she escapes to the only known colony of uninfected humans. That's the story in a nutshell, but it's was good enough to persuade the powers that be in Hollywood to make it not once, but three times (well, four really, but the forth one is so bad that it's not worth mentioning here).

Vincent Price played the roll of Dr. Robert Morgan in Ubaldo Ragona's The Last Man on Earth, filmed in and around Eur, Rome. This version of the film is tame, almost laughably so, by today's standards, as the slow-moving zombies bump into the good doctor's house chanting his name. Not much scare there. Yet, the scene where Dr. Morgan tosses the dead bodies into the city dump and lights them on fire was considered so disturbing in 1967 that it was cut from the American release of the film. Boris Sagal's 1971 film The Omega Man stars Charlton Heston as Dr. Robert Neville, the lone survivor charging around LA, blasting zombies, while he searches for a cure in his fortified townhouse. This version is really the classic of the three, and a movie that cannot be much improved upon, except maybe for some better zombie makeup. And in 2007, Francis Lawrence gave us I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, who spends his day cruising the streets of New York City with his dog Sam, looking for mutants and his nights in his fortified townhouse looking for a cure. Here the zombies have gone completely animal on us. They no longer think, they simply act aggressively, except perhaps for the leader who holds a slight grudge against Dr. Neville. But even he's only marginally smarter than the rest of the snarling, slobbering brood.

So why three versions of the same story? Cuz the folks in Hollywood don't have a lot of imagination, so they just keep rehashing the same stories again and again. All three movies are adaptations of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. The Last Man on Earth is, however, not that great, and begged for a remake. It was a low budget film, shot in Italy, with bad make-up on grainy black and white film. Let's face it, brain-eating zombies didn't look all that menacing in movies back in the 1950s and 60s. They usually just put a lot of white pancake on the actors' faces, added a whole bunch of eyeliner, mussed up their hair and put them in shabby clothes. The Omega Man is the best of the lot. Its zombies are really just folks who've been turned into light-sensitive albinos by the plague, and they have it out for old Chuck cuz he's the one they think is responsible for it. These zombies are smart, they're organized, they have weapons, and they have a plan. Also, by 1971, Hollywood had become a little more aware of America's ethnic makeup, and the survivors - zombie and otherwise - were both black and white. This film was pretty radical for its time in that Lisa (Rosalind Cash), the uninfected woman who Heston's character gets jiggy with, is black. By 2007, Hollywood is definitely integrated, at least in the SciFi realm. In I Am Legend, Dr. Neville is played by a black man and Anna (Alice Braga) - the uninfected woman he finds - is played by an Hispanic, making it a much better representation of New York society. Special effects have also gotten more sophisticated (notice I didn't say better). The zombie hoards that Will Smith must contend with are computer animated monsters that move at lightning speed and possess near-superhuman strength. Sucks to fight zombies in the 21st Century, dude.

The Last Man in the World is rated G and is filmed in black and white.

The Omega Man is rated PG and is filmed in color.

I Am Legend is rated PG13 and is filmed in color.

One can only assume that the next version will be rated R and will be filmed in 3D. Oh the horror!