When I saw that the last man on Earth had somehow ended up facing an army of the undead in a parking garage armed with only a pair of nunchucks, I wondered just how dimwitted all the other people who didn’t survive must have been. And when the last man on Earth saw a rabbit and giddily began chasing after it, I thought that perhaps this was some sort of scenario where a mutant virus had attacked the human brain destroying all those with I.Q.s over 50.
But when the last man on Earth got drunked up on a six pack of beer, took a whiz on some rocks and shouted, “I’m pissing on you, world!” I began to feel reassured because the one thing I’m looking forward to when the world ends is the ability to relieve myself on the go without worrying about someone whining about me watering his precious rose bushes.
Really though, we’re in good hands since the last man Earth in this movie is Mark Dacascos, star of Kickboxer 5, Only The Strong and American Samurai. He does a decent job running here and there, looking pensive whenever he thinks he hears something, and shooting, stabbing, and kicking zombies. He also blows up all of Los Angeles. How can you not like a guy like that?
Clearly, The Asylum is putting this film out to capitalize on the Will Smith version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. This is after all the company that brought us Snakes On A Train and The Da Vinci Treasure. The title, I Am Omega, is a nice combination of I Am Legend and the earlier Charlton Heston version called The Omega Man, but it strikes me as a bit of inside baseball.
Are the people dumb enough to duped into watching this movie going to even know that The Omega Man even existed? Heck, the first thing I thought of when I heard the title was that this was another one of those Jesus freak movies featuring Kirk Cameron. Sure, he starred in Growing Pains, but that’s not exactly Kickboxer 5, is it?
Dacascos plays Renchard, who is apparently the only guy left on the planet. He had a hallucination early in the film where the radio starting broadcasting what sounded like the backstory of what caused everyone to turn into really gooey, bloodthirsty bastards, but I’m not really much of a radio guy, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention.
Besides, who cares how it happened? Just so long as whatever calamity it was resulted in Renchard being slightly crazed, haunted by the death of his family, and an expert martial artist with demolitions experience, we’ll get along fine without much in the way of explanation.
The first part of the movie finds Renchard puttering around his fortress-like rural home, reading, checking maps, shaving, shooting zombies, practicing his kickfighting, and wallowing in self pity about his family getting wasted in the prologue.
When he’s not having a pity party at home, he’s out and about, making beer runs, setting up bombs, shooting zombies, running around in the sewers, and peeing wherever he wants. To quote one of the other redundant prone characters in the movie, it is a “perfect utopia.”
Renchard’s perfect utopia is shattered though when he gets a video message on his Apple laptop (PC users will not survive the apocalypse just like the Bible predicted!) from some broad in the city! It’s Brianna and she was on her way to the survivors’ enclave known as Antioch, but somehow got trapped by herself in L.A.! And she wants Renchard to rescue her!
No dice! Sorry lady! Renchard’s too haunted and/or lazy to do it! Maybe you’ll get lucky and be on the way to one of his beer runs or something.
The funny, and by funny, I mean sucky, thing about this movie is that once Brianna is introduced and the movie shifts into plot-heavy mode, the movie heads down the sewer faster than a last man on Earth laden with homemade explosives.
Two guys claiming to be from Antioch appear at Renchard’s place asking him for help in locating Brianna because her blood could be used as an antivirus for whatever is going on and could save mankind. But they turn out to be a couple of scuzzy liars who want the opposite because they don’t want the old world to come back since they believe in survival of the fittest!
From this point on nothing makes any sense. First of all, how does anyone have an Internet connection in the middle of nowhere after civilization has collapsed that allows them to broadcast and receive video messages? And somehow the bad guys could eavesdrop on Brianna’s and Renchard’s conversation over the computer and locate Renchard’s place to go and confront him?
But beyond the technical questions, the story asks the characters to ignore what they already know just so that we can have this chase through the city and conflict between Renchard and the two goons.
The two bad guys know that Renchard is planning to blow up the city. The girl is in the city with no means of escape. They know that Renchard has refused to help her. So she will die when the city explodes. Which is what the two goons want. So why in the hell are they going into the city to capture her with the express purpose of preventing her from helping anyone when she’s as good as dead anyway?
Just because it allows Renchard to have a fight with one of the guys where he throws a tire at him, doesn’t let the movie off the hook for its monumental internal stupidity.
Still, the monsters are icky enough, Renchard gets shot several times, beat with a chain, has a car wreck, and sets a pile of corpses on fire. It’s pretty much enough mayhem to allow the viewer to suffer through the dumb story without too much difficulty. And L.A. does get blown up. It’s hard to criticize any film that does that!
© 2013 MonsterHunter
