See Vincent Price play a rare good guy role and be as uncomfortable as me on a pink Rainbow Brite tricycle in this half-baked low budget adaptation of Richard Matheson’s science fiction novel, I Am Legend. It’s the one about the last normal man alive in a world where everyone else has become a vampire. By day, he gathers food from abandoned supermarkets and puts stakes through hibernating bloodsuckers. By night, he hides out in his house with boards over the windows while vamps outside try to pound their way in.
The miscasting of Price isn’t the only problem here. Like a vampire, director Sidney Salkow drains all of the life out of Matheson’s story. He kills the pace by plopping a twenty-four minute flashback right in the middle of the film (in the novel, Matheson wisely breaks up the flashbacks) and he handles the big dramatic moments with all of the grace of a postman delivering junk mail. Matheson was so dissatisfied with it that he insisted on the pseudonym Logan Swanson for his co-screenwriting credit.
For all its flaws, this film is notable for arguably inventing the modern movie zombie. In the book (which George Romero cites as an influence on Night of the Living Dead), the vampires are able to move and run around normally. In this movie though, the vampires are weak and slow-moving stumbling dummies… exactly like Romero’s zombies four years later.