Honkies, spooks and eight-track tapes: Omega Man’s post-apocalyptic world is comically locked in the early seventies. Charlton Heston plays Dr Robert Neville, the seeming sole survivor of a virus outbreak who must contend with the infected, a vampire-like clan known as ‘the family’, while pursuing a last ditch effort to find a cure. The film is the second of three adaptations made of a sci-fi novella, wedged between Will Smith’s botched update I Am Legend and the 1964 original, Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. Omega Man borrows heavily from the b-movie theatrics of Last Man on Earth, but while the Vincent Price vehicle appeared earnest in its attempt to convey horror, Omega Man is well aware of its campiness (at least I hope) and milks it with abandon. Those recently confused by M Night’s Shyamalan’s The Happening, need only look at Omega Man as a precedent for such a big industry released schlock-fest.

It is easy to see why it took some thirty years for Warner Brothers to reboot this otherwise great concept franchise: Omega Man is cheap exploitation cinema that runs the gamut from silly biblical allegories to head-scratching blaxploitation caveats, and none of it has aged particularly well. It seems incredible that only a couple years separate this goofy Heston film and his more competent venture into sci-fi, Soylent Green. Like with The Happening, I have to believe Omega Man is entirely anachronistic, although some of the hit-you-over-the-head thematic points about science versus religion appear wincingly sincere at times, and maybe this makes apologists out of some for what is otherwise a shoddy mess of a film.

Will Smith’s I Am Legend echoes a lot of the narrative beats of Omega Man, the opening car sequence, the mannequin flirtation, the New York apartment siege, but where the two differ is with regards to the enemy. As the update went for a more literal vampire treatment to the infected, ‘the family’ in Omega Man looks like something out of Mark Borchardt’s Coven, and their acting is about as wooden. They are a puritan cult that say stock villainy things and have as much going for them as the goons in the old Batman tv show. However these villains do share something in common with the I Am Legend lot: an utter lack of any kind of threat to raise the stakes for Dr Neville, and this has been the ongoing failure of this movie franchise, for without this palpable threat, there is very little than navel-gazing at the ‘what if’ scenario it poses. In keeping with the exploitation vibe of the movie, Heston’s Neville, of course, has to play out the male fantasy of being a virile Adam to his potential Eve, and when he is not bedding a woman he is shooting down the baddies.

Omega Man was a disappointment from the first elevator music bebop of the score to the final painfully arch motif of Heston’s sacrifice fading into the closing credits. This film is thinking of nothing but how to get butts in seats, and I was pretty bored watching it. I felt none of the loneliness of the protagonist or doubts as to humanity’s value that I suspect the source material aspired to convey, and as a doomsday scenario to voyeuristically experience, I was left unsatisfied.