Really Weird Cinema: Last Man on Earth 1964 & Invisible Invaders 1959

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:06]Well, welcome to another edition of 42nd Street Pete's Grindhouse Really Weird Cinema kicking off the week. And speaking of kicking off the week, let's kick out last week, what happened because uh you know something in the overall scheme of things uh it's like the mega thing. You know, you got a president who basically lies and lies and lies and believes his own lies and you got people that believe the lies. Same [ __ ] that happened to me last week. You got a big mouth that lies and lies and lies and in her own mind she believes her own lies and that gives her followers cause to believe the lies. So, basically I was never at Cinema Wasteland. I was erased from Cinema Wasteland. I erased myself. So, any pictures you see of me at Cinema Wasteland were obviously AI or photoshopped. So, let's just go with that. Even the panels. The panels were all AI and photoshopped. So, anyway, now that's out of the way and I'm clear of that whole mess.

[00:01:04]Uh let's go back to 1964 with a black and white classic called Last Man on Earth based on Richard Matheson's uh book I Am Legend.

[00:01:18]You see back in the day, junior high school, high school, whatever if we were really looking for horror writers, we really didn't have a lot to choose from. There was Matheson. There was Robert Bloch. To a certain extent Ray Bradbury.

[00:01:34]I really can't think of anyone else until, you know things sort of like cranked up a little bit down the line.

[00:01:42]The only other books I could think of that were even slightly horror related were these psychic phenomenon books which I'm going to have to see if I can find any because I remember reading these when I was a teenager, you know, stuff like spontaneous combustion and ghosts and witches and people disappearing and strange [ __ ] like that.

[00:02:02]So, but anyway, >> [snorts] >> uh Last Man on Earth starred Vincent Price and was shot in Italy and is probably the closest movie to come to the book.

[00:02:13]And of course, um it's obvious that that sort of inspired uh George Romero's work.

[00:02:21]But it's a creepy little thing, you know, here's here's Vincent, you know, wa- wandering around the city by day staking out vampires and being barricaded in his house at night surrounded by these vampires. One of them who is Giacomo Rossi Stuart, who I talked about last time, who was banging on the house with this 2 by 4 and [ __ ] and uh you know, um pretty much the premise was that there was a worldwide plague that wiped everybody out, but people came back as bloodsucking vampires.

[00:02:55]And the weaker ones were killed by the stronger ones, and every day Vince has to go out there and uh clean up the mess they leave of corpses and stuff like that. Uh Vincent's name in this movie is Morgan.

[00:03:09]So, when this came out in '64, I was probably 12 years old, but I remember seeing the write-ups in Famous Monsters cuz that was our Bible back then.

[00:03:21]Saw stills from the film, but the film never came around to my area. If it did, and of course, 12 years old, right after the Newark riots, which was close to that '64 time period, nobody's going to let 12-year-old kid take a bus down to Newark to see a horror movie. It's that simple. Matter of fact, the only time I ever went to Newark to see a horror movie was when The Frozen Dead and It Came Out in a Double Bill. Somehow we got down there to see that, but mostly if it wasn't local like the Embassy, the Hollywood, uh the Or Mont, uh places like that, we didn't see it. So, Last Man on Earth slid below my radar because it didn't play any place locally.

[00:04:06]Um years later, it showed up late at night and that's where uh a bunch of us, you know, problem drinkers saw it, pretty much in my basement sitting on an old couch, three or four of us, you know, watching this thing at 12:30 in the morning drinking and the amusing part to me was that, you know, the Gia uh Connie Rossi's short character kept saying, "Morgan, we're going to kill you, Morgan. We know you're in there, Morgan." Well, Big Al's last name was Morgan. So, we kept saying, "See, Al, they're going to kill you. They want to [ __ ] kill you. The vampires even want to kill you." Which we got, you know, the usual shut the [ __ ] up.

[00:04:39]So, anyway, it sort of follows Vince's trial, you know, Morgan's trials and tribulations as he goes through the city staking out vampires.

[00:04:48]And then he finds a small dog that's alive and wounded, and he bandages up the dog.

[00:04:53]But for whatever reason, he checks the dog's blood and the dog has the virus, and he drives a stake through the [ __ ] dog's heart. Like, what the [ __ ] So, while he's burying uh the dog, this woman comes walking up to him and then sees him and runs away, and he takes her back to his place, and her name is Ruth, and she says she's a survivor, but actually what she is is she's a spy because there are other people that survived this that aren't bloodthirsty vampires, and it seems that, you know, Morgan in his little uh daily routine might have staked out a bunch of live people.

[00:05:31]So, they're really pissed off at him, even though he does something with his blood and cures Ruth, she tells him that he has to get out because she's the one sent in to like basically, you know, uh I guess soften him up, so to speak, or make him unaware that there's people coming to kill him.

[00:05:50]So, these soldiers arrive and of course they use these iron spikes to stake out the vampires.

[00:05:56]Um, the one who kept yelling kill Morgan who was up on the roof and gets machine gunned off.

[00:06:01]Uh, Morgan runs into the town and is cornered in a church and eventually is shot and then staked out and basically says, "I'm a man, not a freak or whatever." And it ends. Um, it's a very atmospheric creepy [ __ ] movie because, you know, when he's roaming around there's bodies lying just about everywhere. You see a very desolate city with, you know, corpses laying on steps and sidewalks and in bushes and stuff like that. So, it's pretty post-apocalyptic.

[00:06:32]Plus, you know, the flashback scene where the plague is spreading, his little girl gets it and dies and, um, he told his wife, "Do not let anyone in the house because they're basically picking up the bodies and throwing them in a fire pit." So, when he goes home after being the only scientist left in his lab, he sees a truck pulling away from his house and he goes in and he goes, "You let them take her?" And his wife's just standing there, you know, numb to the whole thing.

[00:07:00]And he runs down to the fire pit screaming, "I want my little girl." And one of the guys says, "There's plenty of little girls in that pit including mine."

[00:07:08]So, when he goes home his wife is dying and then she comes back from the dead and then we go back we segue into what he's doing now.

[00:07:15]So, >> [snorts] >> unfortunately, the film fell into public domain and there was shitty versions of it floating around all over the place.

[00:07:23]Um, but one I watched was sent to me by Legend Films as they had sent me a handful of DVDs with what were public domain films that they decided to colorize. I didn't watch the colorized version on this one because I wanted to, uh, revisit it the way I had seen it back in the day.

[00:07:41]So, was that the influence on George Romero or was a 1959 film called Invisible Invaders a source of inspiration for George Romero? Because this one, despite its low-budget roots, is really [ __ ] scary. I mean, I saw this as a kid. I don't know what time it was on, but there's a scientist played by John Carradine who in the beginning of the film gets blown up in his lab.

[00:08:10]And a couple other scientists are at his funeral and one goes home and there's a knock on his door and there is the John Carradine character dead, but possessed by an alien presence who basically tells this scientist that in three days, we're going to invade your planet and if you don't surrender, we're going to destroy you.

[00:08:26]So, of course nobody believes the guy.

[00:08:29]So, he gets another scientist played by Robert Hutton to go [clears throat] out to the cemetery with them.

[00:08:35]And of course, the creepy [ __ ] is you see bushes just part where somebody's coming through them and you see the dirt like move like heavy feet are pushing it out of the way.

[00:08:46]So, the scientist explains that nobody's going to believe him and then the alien says, "We're going to give you warnings." One is basically stock footage of a plane crashing and the bloody pilot going into a football game, strangling one announcer, then grab knocking the other one out, then grabbing the microphone saying, "People of Earth, this is your warning.

[00:09:07]What we're going to invade, whatever."

[00:09:09]The next one's more stock footage of a car crash scene taken from Thunder Road and again a bloody corpse is standing in an announcing booth with two dead people there and telling them they're going to invade.

[00:09:20]Well, they do invade and we get a lot of stock footage of buildings burning, dams blowing up, all kinds of other [ __ ] And John Agar comes in as the major and they're going to go out to this um hideaway place where they can work on a weapon to make these things visible and kill them.

[00:09:37]Well, the walking corpses or the living dead or whatever they called them there are definitely Romero-esque. They have blood on their faces, their sunken eyes are sunken in, their cheeks are dark, you know, the whole, you know, death shadow type thing. And they're walking like this. So, yeah, there's a lot of them around and on the way to the thing, um, they are confronted by a farmer who wants their Jeep and of course John Agar being the loyal soldier he is puts a bullet through the guy's head.

[00:10:06]Well, right away the guy gets up because he's possessed by the corpse.

[00:10:11]I mean, the alien rather.

[00:10:13]So, they're in their bunker trying to figure this stuff out. They're using colors of the spectrum and stuff like that. But then they figure they got to catch one of these guys.

[00:10:22]So, they come up with this acrylic liquid and first time they go out they spray one of them with it, but the alien leaves the body because he feels something's going on and knocks John Agar out. So, they realize they can't do it that way. So, they dig a pit and fill it with this liquid and, um, the farmer zombie, as we call him, sees John Agar and staggers off toward him and falls in the pit. Then they pull him out and encased him in Lucite or whatever that [ __ ] is.

[00:10:49]So, then they put him in this, um, chamber in in the, uh, bunker that they're in.

[00:10:56]And basically use some kind of thing to break off, you know, the acrylic, but the alien abandons the body. You see a chair it's sat on. You see a microphone get picked up and he's basically telling them that, you know, if they surrender he'll let them live, but everybody on Earth is going to be dead in a day or so.

[00:11:14]So, the John Agar character thinks he's bluffing. The Robert Hutton character is getting scared and decides to let him out. There's a big fight. Uh, a beaker or something is thrown causing this horrible [ __ ] you know, siren noise, but they notice that the corpse that the alien went back into is vibrating.

[00:11:35]So, now they know it's some kind of sound that works it up, so they come up with some kind of sound ray gun, which they shoot the alien with.

[00:11:44]Where he stands up and then falls down and becomes a a little pile of soap suds.

[00:11:49]So, of course, they go out and they start zapping all these creatures and um then find the spaceship and zap that, it blows up, and the technology is passed on, and John Agar once again saves the world. So, that's the story.

[00:12:04]But, these creatures, these living dead things were pretty much a template for what Romero did in Night of the Living Dead.

[00:12:12]And, you know, here's two films that basically, you know, one was in the late '50s, one was in the mid-'60s that basically influenced Romero to make probably, you know, the greatest American horror film of all times. And a true American horror film because let's face it, we didn't really have anything. We, you know, of course, we had the giant monsters in the '50s, the atomic mutants and things like that, and the gothic, you know, Frankenstein, Dracula, the But, there wasn't anything uniquely American until Romero made Night of the Living Dead.

[00:12:44]So, that's just my opinion. I might be wrong. Some people might have other opinions. But, yeah, these two films are definitely worth seeking out because they're original, you know, walking corpse attacks people films. The old zombie films from back in the '40s, they didn't attack anybody. They just sort of roamed around and looked spooky.

[00:13:01]So, that's our show for today. Thanks for subscribing and thanks for tuning in.

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