2 gibbles out of 5

Director: Boris Sagal

Underwhelming and pretty cheesy, “The Omega Man” turns its haunting premise into an unterrifying staging of “I Am Legend.”

Charlton Heston plays Robert Neville, who, upon story’s opening, is touring around a seemingly empty L.A., blasting through the tattered streets in a nice car before stopping by an apartment building to budda-budda some machine gun action at someone hiding behind some blinds.  The music and shooting style have a thrilling 70s zip to them, and dumping the viewer into such a scenario is absolutely gripping.   Heston passes by decaying bodies and freaks at the sight of a calendar, then stops by an movie theater to watch a movie we come to understand has been the only thing playing on the screen for some years: “Woodstock.”  He wistfully quotes along with some of the “love one another” statements from the movie.

It’s dated, but effective.  Heston exits the theater and panics momentarily over the setting sun, mumbling that “they’ll be waking up soon.”  Suddenly, every phone on the block starts to ring, and continues to do so until Heston closes his eyes and reminds himself that its all an illusion.  The phones stop ringing.

The film had me up til here.  It lingers on the isolation, and though Heston’s talking-to-himself gab is sort of stilted, it plays up the delusions that would most likely occur in such isolation.  We understand it and believe it.  So Heston takes off in his car, racing the setting sun, then, when he’s pulling into the garage of his fortress – his home which he’s barricaded off with barbed wire and sandbags and floodlights – he’s attacked by some cloaked individuals.  Who don’t seem particularly threatening.

Cue the rest of the movie, where cloaked individuals hang out outside Heston’s apartment making raspberrys and suddenly there’s another group of humans in the world, including a hot black chick named Lisa (Rosalind Cash) who, y’know, it’s been a while, so let’s get naked together.

The film flutters around a good script.  It has an attempted science background in explaining these cloaked individuals as mutated humans as a result of biological warfare, and there’s some brief but interesting chatter about the “stages” of the disease.  The evolution of the characters also shows that there’s something ticking under the hood.  Though the twists and turns aren’t so much surprising, the film does take a bleaker path than one might expect.  But a little bit more restraint might’ve taken the effectiveness of the movie much farther.  The “mutants” never seem like all that much to be feared (moreso an annoyance) and that gripping isolating opening pretty much loses all footing with plenty of people onscreen with Heston from fifteen minutes or so on.  Maybe some of them are mutants, but the special effects / budgets of the time period can’t do much more than give them white makeup.  Otherwise they look and sound like humans, with too little time given to explaining their methods to make them anything more than cloak-wearing yahoos.

So “The Omega Man” was a bit of a disappointment.  “I Am Legend” is enough of a one-man survivor tale to spring the several movies that it has, but this 70s Heston version opts for a more loud and proud action vehicle than a thinking man’s tale, where slow motion motorcycle stunts cover up some of the more compelling aspects of its script.