The first film adaptation of “I Am Legend” by Richard Matheson, starring Vincent Price.
Nits: at the start of the film, Morgan (played by Price) puts two corpses in his station wagon, both headfirst (one male and one female). When he gets to the pit to throw them in, the woman has not only switched sides with the man, but she is now in the car feet first.
A newspaper headline refers to “Europe’s disease” but places the apostrophe after the ‘s,’ reading “Europes’ disease.”
When Morgan’s wife became reanimated as a vampire, I wondered how she got out of the ground where he had buried her. This would be quite a feat for a human being, but the vampires are all shown to be extremely weak.
The plague victims are being taken away in trucks to be burned in the pit. Meanwhile, Morgan’s daughter is sick and he tells his wife not to let anyone in. When he arrives home later, he sees a truck right in front of his house leaving. He could have chased it then rather easily. But no, he goes in and confirms that his daughter is gone from her bed, that she was taken away, and then asks, “Was that the truck? Was that the truck?” Well, what did you think the truck was doing right in front of your house?
At the pit, we see soldiers (?) throwing a body into the pit. A voice says, “Sorry, lady. There’s nothing I can do.” Yet there are no women in the shot (not letterboxed, though). I wondered if he was apologizing to the person he was throwing in. I wasn’t too clear whether they were throwing live plague victims in there, but I guess they would have to.
The vampires in this story were afraid of their reflection. In the other vampire movies I’ve seen, they had no reflection.
Morgan said the wooden stakes he was using had to be wide enough to keep the flesh apart so the vampires’ body seal couldn’t function. But later, when he finds vampires staked by someone else, he takes the stake out of one of them and takes it home with him.
Robert Morgan seems to be a scientist with two left hands. He had three years to turn his home into a fort, but he did nothing more than hang some mirrors, garlic and put some random planks in front of the windows, leaving a lot of holes. Luckily for him the zompires (vambies?) are indeed pretty stupid and weak. (But as we see later on, one vampire does find a way to open the front door.)
Morgan has stayed in his house all these years while he could have searched for a better hiding place. He could also have taken some guns and bullets to protect himself.
It seems he is immune due to a bat bite in Panama. I know it is just a theory, but this could mean that there must be quite a few immune people in that country. Probably they are just trying to survive over there as well.
The paramilitary gang wants to execute Morgan because he has apparently killed some of their tribe of semi-infected people. Isn't that very stupid? Wouldn't it indeed be better to send Ruth over there to spy and let her return with a full report first?
While they accuse Morgan of having killed vampires that could still be saved they are pretty ruthless themselves, shooting at every vampire that sieges Morgan's house. How can they be so sure that none of them is curable?
Unless: we know that the vampires can only be killed with a stake through the heart, it could be that the bullets just temporarily disables them.
Like the original novel, there is no clear answer as to where this virus came from.
Vincent Price did an excellent job, IMO.