By the time Laurie and I hatched, in 1964, on the very precipice between the baby boomers and Generation X, pop culture was mixing up the kitschy and the surreal like crazy, as if it was serious drama! Sci fi and horror are really fun. Movies that are called thrillers or suspense, not so much. In that way I am similar to my young friend Nicklaus who claims to "need a little more genre than that." Hence, to really enjoy the screen-viewing experience, I need colorful scenery, or intense black and white textures combined with maudlin, overplayed music, at least most of the time. I love the way the millenial kids (or Gen-Y or whatever Nick is) use words so diffeerntly, like the word "random," to refer to incongruity, or even merely a surprising or unfamiliar event. I like it though, it's cute. I am entranced by vincent price at any age, doing anything. On the few feature length sci fi selections at Hulu.com, you can see Vincent play THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, and we learn very early on in the film that the earth's last man is also the world's fussiest fussbudget. But all the furious fussbudgeting in the world, ultimately, cannot protect you from zombies, Vincent.




But I could have told you vincent, this whirled was never meant for one as beautiful as






Vincent Price. I love his voice, the way he looks, the way he moves... the way if he is in a movie you know it's going to have a sort of elegant and sweet paranormal aspect to it. Vincent is too graceful, too much of a twinkle in the eye to be truly creepy, no matter how macabre a story he is supposedly depicting. I bet it wouldn't be so bad being the last one. For many it would be a welcome relief because
we are bombarded by so much interaction all the time. For many of us it would flux back and forth between being fun and hassle-free and convenient and plentiful versus being lonely and burdened with no one to share the responsibility of survival or even to share our thoughts with. But isn't that true all the time anyway no matter what our situation is? Surrounded by people or in the midst of zombies we approach life as a struggle between our reason and our resignation. Maybe the film is meant as a metaphor, or a macrocosm of the existential dialogue that occurs to everyone who's conscious life is about being an individual, perceiving other entities as completely separate and undivine.



Yeah, I'm thinking it could be about what it's like to be sentient, , or how challenging it is to incarnate in the often threatening time/space realm. or it could be merely an illustration of what it is like to be one person in a big culture . Or it could just be a zombie movie.... As in, theres' zombies outside, trying to get into your house so you'd better try to avoid them
when you're out and try to keep them from getting into the place you stay at! Wait a minute . Were some of them not really zombies and he just thought they were and had to destroy them right away but some of them thought that they were the last people on earth and that he was the attacking monster. It's not clear to me, and I wonder if it's clear to Vincent, who takes their lives, as lovers often doooooooo


Yeah man. Still fresh. But I'll take only what I need. It's gotta last.


Art is science made clear. -Jean Cocteau