I Am Legend broke all box office records for December, taking in over $77 million over the weekend. For those of you who are too busy finishing up your Christmas shopping to wait in lines that stretch around the block, we present an alternative that can be enjoyed on your own schedule in the comfort of your home: The Omega Man. Based on the same 1954 Richard Matheson novel as the Will Smith blockbuster, this 1971 sci-fi extravaganza stars Charlton Heston as plague survivor Robert Neville. Seemingly the last human resident of Los Angeles, Neville fills his days with one-sided chess games and repeated screenings of Woodstock. At night, however, albino mutants emerge from the underground, wielding torches and firing arrows at our hero. But as the trailer narrator intones, “the last man on earth always carries an automatic weapon. Of course he does – and you can have it when you pry it from his cold, dead hands. The special effects may not be as impressive as in the current version, but can anything in I Am Legend match the paranoid intensity of this “ringing phones” sequence? We think not.
