Now that’s a good intro: Robert Neville (Charl­ton Hes­ton) cruises through an empty city with the top down. It’s eerie, but he seems happy, groov­ing to jazz from his onboard 8-track cas­sette deck. But sud­denly! Screech! Ka-pow! He brakes, pro­duces a machine gun and fires at a fleet­ing humanoid sil­hou­ette. A strik­ing mon­tage fol­lows of a des­o­lated, deserted city.

Hes­ton was once known as a lib­eral, and here his char­ac­ter enter­tains an inter­ra­cial romance (with afro-licious Ros­alind Cash) no more com­mon in movies now than it was in 1971. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s now impos­si­ble to take Hes­ton seri­ously, thanks to Phil Hartman’s clas­sic mock­ery on Sat­ur­day Night Live and to Heston’s own Alzheimer’s-fueled descent into right-wing senility.

Al Gore can take my gun from my cold, dead hands

Inter­est­ingly, Heston’s oeu­vre is dom­i­nated by dystopian sci-fi: Planet of the Apes, The Ωmega Man, and Soy­lent Green form a tril­ogy of apoc­a­lyp­tic despair. Remakes of Apes (by Tim Bur­ton) and Ωmega (Wil Smith’s I Am Leg­end) made him nearly obso­lete even before he died. Can Soy­lent Green (which is, inci­den­tally, much bet­ter than its rep­u­ta­tion sug­gests) be far behind?

Com­pared to the bes­tial vam­pires that pop­u­late I Am Leg­end, the crea­tures in The Ωmega Man are an intel­li­gent, religous cult. They don’t attack Neville with tech­nol­ogy (like, say, shoot him) sim­ply because they choose not to.

Is the last man on earth man enough?

As for enter­tain­ment in a time before VHS, the last man alive on earth is stuck with what­ever hap­pened to be in the the­aters at the time; he screens the con­cert film Wood­stock over and over. As for The Ωmega Man’s own music, the orches­tral jazz pop score is not just out­dated, but bizarrely inappropriate.

The cru­ci­fix­ion pose at the end is a bit much. I didn’t expect much sub­tlety, but that’s lay­ing it on a bit thick.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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