The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) The year 1547. Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at the Medina stronghold on the coast of Spain from England to inquire into his sister Elizabeth's recent demise. Not so recent to Barnard's shock—she has been dead for three months and he's only recently been informed. "Something in the blood" is the vague cause and that makes him even more suspicious. Perhaps if Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) wasn't so circumspect, and Elizabeth's husband Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) wasn't so...peculiarly and demonstrably aggrieved. No matter. Barnard vows not to leave the place until he "knows exactly what has happened here." Despite Medina's overwrought emotions, Barnard cannot be convinced that something suspicious hasn't happened to his sister.

A post-dinner visit by Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) reveals to Barnard that it wasn't some blood disease, but that Elizabeth "died of fright"—a shock to her heart. Nicholas Medina, you see, is the son of Don Sebastian Medina, "one of the Inquisition's most infamous, degraded..." torturers, it seems. And the Medina castle is just as he left it, with a basement torture chamber reeking of the evil "malignant atmosphere of the castle...the barbaric miasma that permeates these walls." Elizabeth was drawn to it, fascinated by it.

In blue-tinted flashbacks, Nicholas tells of the initial happy weeks of marriage between himself and Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), until her moods began to change and he would find her periodically wandering through the basement torture chamber, until one day she was found inside an "iron maiden", quite dead. But, Nicholas may not be entirely trusted, as he himself suffers from a wracked guilt, having witnessed the death of his uncle and mother at the hands of his father, accusing them of infidelity. Dr. Leon adds that although Nicholas' mother may have been tortured, there was speculation that she was entombed alive by his wicked father. That idea has become an obsession with Nicholas, only now it seems to repeat itself as everyone in the castle starts to hear nocturnal harpsichord playing—as Elizabeth once had—possessing the Don to think his late wife's spirit haunts the castle. And him.

Something, indeed, strange is going on, as everyone has heard the playing with Elizabeth's ruby ring found near the keys and Barnard's presence and truculent insistence to get to the truth only inspires more tragedy. He can't leave well enough alone, going so far as to insist that Elizabeth herself may have been prematurely buried—which seems to be born out when they break through her walled-in sarcophagus and find the moldering skeleton of Elizabeth seemingly trying to scratch through her coffin-lid. This drives Nicholas right over the babbling edge.

Although ostensibly the hero of the story, Barnard is, for the story's purposes, more of a useful idiot. It is only appropriate, then, that he should be the potential victim for the setting and device of the title. With Nicholas' mind snapped by Elizabeth's presence, he seems possessed of his torturer-father's mad spirit and straps his nosy antagonist to a slab in the deepest reaches of the castle and starts the elaborate process of lowering a razor-sharp pendulum ever lower to eviscerate his unwanted guest.

However convoluted the way is to get him down there, the sequence in the pit is a genuine nail-biter, with the heavy blade moving alarmingly fast in its swings looking to nearly slam into the camera as it passes near along with a vicious cross-cut editing employed that seems to build with every oscillation of the stroke until the thing threatens to shred Barnard's shirt as it relentlessly moves on its path to disembowel him. In fact, Barnard is such an unsympathetic character that one wouldn't be surprised if he actually does get sliced in two before the end credits.

The script is far more elaborate than the previous effort, House of Usher, had been with less psychic imaginings and more genuine evil informing its plot, with healthy doses of the previous film's curses and cracked psyches and obsession with premature burial. Yes, the cast is still limited...to six major players this time (up from Usher's four) with Price and "Britain's first lady of horror," Barbara Steele, at the start of her film career fresh from Mario Bava's Black Sunday, as the leads (even though Steele has barely six minutes of screen-time, her presence rather haunts the film). Price is allowed to go fully over the top of this one as he fairly jabbers his way into madness thinking himself the reincarnation of his dead father.

But, the movie has less to do with any supernatural evil than it does with the malignancies of evil perpetrated by real flesh-and-blood human beings who just happen to have a mean streak and no compunction to curtail it. In a way, people get the comeuppance they deserve not by spirits but by their own actions There's a genuine plot being perpetrated and those actions only unleash a monster rather than the planned consequences intended. And the final cruelty Matheson has devised is one even Poe might have blanched at—complete and utter uncaring apathy—with a surprise twist in the final shot.

Oh, it's entertaining, alright. And although Price may be going a bit overboard thespianing his way into lip-curling madness, he's fun to watch. But, the skill-level has gained a few notches with much more moody cinematography than the previous Poe film and a third act that's a corker including a line that has seared into my movie-memory forever: "Maximillian, we must break into the torture chamber! Quickly!"

 

You can say that again.

The Pit and the Pendulum was the first AIP Poe film to use 

(and re-use!) these groovy psychedelic graphics

House of Usher (1960)

House of Usher (aka The Fall of the House of Usher) (Roger Corman, 1960) Roger Corman was getting tired of the usual grind at American International Pictures—get enough budget-money to make two black-and-white movies that they could get into drive-in's or the bottom of double-bills and use that money to make one good color film (in Cinemascope...or something like it) that might attract some talent...and box office.

To his horror, he got what he wanted. And something else besides—he got an expanded shooting schedule of 15 days, "a luxury" for AIP. As other studios were making films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe (which was in the public domain), they chose a good "bottle-story" "The Fall of the House of Usher" and secured the talents of fantasy/horror novelist Richard Matheson to come up with a screen-story based on elements of Poe. Script in hand, Corman then spent 1/3 of the film's $300,000 budget on its star Vincent Price, who lost weight for the role, dyed his hair an almost white-blonde and even shaved off his signature mustache for the part. Then to create the proper atmosphere, Corman sent a crew into the Hollywood Hills to photograph what was left of a recent wild-fire and, hearing of a local fire department burning a derelict barn, sent out a couple cameramen to get dramatic shots. That location footage would all save time and money in the special effects department. And, thriftily, be reused in later Corman films.

Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) rides on horseback trough the misty New England deadlands where sits the House of Usher to see his fiancee Madeline (Myrna Fahey), who parted from him at the request of her brother and only relative, Roderick (Price). Like many of the Corman Poe heroes, his audience is instantly refused, but he persists, and gaining interest, an odd request is made by the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe)...to remove his boots.

There's a reason, beyond preserving the carpeting. When meeting the reluctant Roderick, Winthrop's raised voice sends him into a paroxysm of agony. Roderick, you see, (and he implies Madeline) is suffering from "a morbid acuteness of the senses," due to their family history. "Mine," he explains "is the worst for having existed the longer, but both of us are afflicted with it. Any sort of food more exotic then the most pallid mash is unendurable to my taste buds. Any sort of garment other then the softest, is agony to my flesh. My eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination. Odors assail me constantly, and as I've said, sounds of any degree whatsoever inspire me with terror." Brother and sister, he says are like "two pale drops of fire guttering in a vast consuming darkness."

But, it goes beyond that. Roderick believes the Usher line is thoroughly cursed, so much so that the very house is crumbling as if by the weight of a generational evil—the front tower itself has a large crack in it, the land around it dead. "This house. The pall of evil which fills it is no illusion. For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls. The house itself is evil now." To Winthrop, these are the ravings (although quiet) of a madman, and he informs Roderick that he intends to take Madeline away and marry her—which, if the house is cursed and is going to crumble, would it be a good thing, no?

But, Roderick will have none of it. "You cannot take my sister out of this house. If she were to bear children, the Usher evil would spread - malignant, cancerous." He warns Winthrop to leave the house forever, forget Madeline, and spare himself a terrible fate. Which, of course, Winthrop has no intention of doing. He entreats Madeline to leave with him, but, in the night, she dies and Roderick has her buried in the family crypt, her coffin chained.

Roderick can't be reasoned with, but Winthrop learns from the butler Bristol, that Madeline has, in the past, suffered from cataleptic fits, leading Winthrop to fear the worst—to persuade him to leave, Roderick has taken advantage of her seizure to pretend that she is dead and has prematurely entombed her. And, at that point, there's a lot of running around and a lot of activity that, if we were staying true to Roderick's infirmities, would have paralyzed him.

Considering AIP's previous output, House of Usher looks positively sumptuous. And if most of the players are a little stiff—stiffer than Madeline becomes—Price more than compensates for it with a theatrical performance that stops short of chewing the "pallid mash" of the scenery, but luxuriates in Matheson's funereally purple prose. He's the center of the story, anyway, so his hefty chunk of the film's budget is money well-spent—if you're putting it all up there on the screen. And Corman's compositions take full advantage of the widescreen format, filling the screen with detail, despite the limitations of the budget. Those extra five days of filming he got were well worth it.

And the Poe preoccupation with premature burial (which would obsess the Corman-Poe adaptations, as well) lends just enough horror to the story that it doesn't resort to "monster-fare" as one of the producers who grudgingly approved the budget complained. The movie made over a million dollars in its initial run, more than justifying the risks taken and launching a string of nicely written, morbid dramas for many years to come.

"What Dreams May Come" and Frequent Cryer Miles

I can't believe I've never transplanted this one over here, and it's one from a long, long time ago. I'm different now, but I doubt if my reaction to the movie might have changed. I've experienced a lot of loss since then. 

But, a recent conversation brought it back to my mind's surface (which I'll explain later) and, not seeing it published here, I figured it was due for an update.

 

What Dreams May Come (Vincent Ward, 1998) One cannot divorce oneself from who we are when we see a movie. Our day-to-day existence informs but also colors our perceptions. 

It's like recording a sound in an environment. My other job is as a sound designer. Recording a sound takes a certain kind of awareness; you must keep in mind that when you record the sound of something in the world, you are also recording the world it is in. I can't calculate how many people have approached me with a recording they made and asked "can you take out the echo?" No. You can't. "Where did you record it?" "My kitchen." All those reflective surfaces. It would have been much better and easier (not to mention more possible) to have taken the recording out of the kitchen than to take the kitchen out of the recording.   

So, too, with watching movies. Our environment, both spatial and emotional, at a particular moment in time in our lives affects the perception of that movie, changing it in our eyes and our minds. It is another example of the Observer Effect, and one who watches a lot of movies (or writes about them) would do well to try to hit "reset" in one's expectations before seeing a film.

But one can't always do that.  I first encountered What Dreams May Come—an adaptation of Richard Matheson's fantasy/psychological novel by New Zealand director Vincent Ward—on an airplane while on a long polar flight to Copenhagen, the first leg of a trip to Scotland with my wife. 18 hour airplane rides are brutal—you're trapped in a tube mere inches from instant death, doing something humans don't naturally do in an area of space where they don't naturally survive.  If something goes wrong, pffft. But, things rarely go wrong, in less proportion than highway accidents do, and the vast majority of people get where they want to go. Competence with small measures of brilliance improve our odds.  So planes, which are constantly in the air, rarely crash...which is what makes it news when it happens.

But the vulnerability must weigh on you.

So, this film, What Dreams May Come: Dr. Christian Nielsen (Robin Williams), a pediatrician, meets and marries Annie Collins (Annabella Sciorra), a painter. They have a couple of kids and live an idyllic life, until the children are killed in a car crash, sending Annie into a crippling depression that institutionalizes her and threatens the star-crossed marriage of "soul-mates." Christy's dedication to her pulls her through, but when he is also killed, she spirals into a suicidal fugue state. Christy's spirit monitors her for awhile but, sensing he's doing more harm than good, moves on to Heaven...or his version of Heaven.

It is a vision shared between his painter-wife and himself—landscapes that she has created—and, initially at least, it is made of paint. 

It's a vivid sequence* (for no small reason What Dreams May Come won that year's Oscar for Best Visual Effects), a combination of photo-realism and impressionism: flowers are crushed and dissolved into gooey oils, foot-prints smear into mud-consistency rainbows, the sky is filled with moving van Gogh-style clouds.

But one man's Heaven... In the land of the living, Annie cannot cope with the loss. In a heart-breaking sequence, she paints a single purple-tinged tree with appears in Christy's after-life, then, despairing, she destroys it with solvent, and Christy watches, horrified as the tree sheds its blooms and dies.

Annie ultimately, in her grief, commits suicide, which condemns her to her own Hell, and Christy risks everything to, Orpheus-like, rescue her from her fate. The smearing of real-life and various after-life myths may have been too many leaps of disbelief for modern audiences to hurdle and the film, despite its many visual splendors, did poorly at the box-office.

Truth is, it's something of a wallow, a morose contemplation of life, death and mythic love. Seeing it now, one notices the ardent manipulation and contrivance that informs the scenario, however masked it is with wonder and amazing conceptual imagination. It borders on the hysterical—the sort of film that I usually dismiss with a churlish "Why doesn't everybody get a good night's sleep and start fresh in the morning?" Or, that's what I say when my feet are planted on terra firma.

But, in the sky, in the lower stratosphere between 29,000 and 39,000 feet, it had a different effect. Both my wife and I were reduced to choking, burbling sobs as the struggles of the souls on-screen turned us to puddles of goo—not unlike the flowers Christy squeezes in his hands. You'd think someone had really died as we were inconsolably grieving in our little pity-party in coach, tears streaming down our cheeks, noses running, tissues shredding, and hearts breaking—and this was the last film shown before landing. We were going to be hollow-eyed, snuffling little woe-be-gones getting off the plane—and, indeed, when the lights came up, a stewardess glanced at us in a way that suggested there wasn't enough glazed peanuts in the world she could give us to cheer us up.

I have been thinking about this off and on the last ten years, wondering why What Dreams May Come was so powerful in-flight and not so much on the ground, when an episode of Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life" recently offered up some anecdotal evidence of elevated emotionalism on flights in a segment entitled "Contrails of My Tears." In it, frequent flyers talk about the incidents of crying at sentimental movies, making mountains out of mole-hills, and generally acting like they'd just had a hit of steroids...or any performance enhancers. That may be the answer. It might not, but I'll take an explanation of why this film had such an effect that one time...and that one time only.

 

Beautiful movie, though.

Post-script: The issue of emotional movies on flights has not gone unnoticed. Virgin Atlantic now offers "weep warnings" before the showing of "emotional movies." The last time I felt really emotional during a movie was when I realized I'd spent $28.00 on a 3-D double bill of Cars 2 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Wonder if that qualifies...

 

Reminds me of a story of a man who took a flight with his wife who was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. At one point during the in-flight, she leaned over to her husband. "If you don't like this movie," she said, "we can always leave." I'm just glad they weren't seated near the exits.

PPS (2022): I had a talk with a friend who'd been going through some tough, tough chemotherapy and there have been complications. At one point, during a recent surgery, something had gone wrong with the oxygen. A nightmare scenario, and he was deprived of oxygen for a minute and a half. Permanent brain damage can occur after 4 minutes—death 4 to 6 minutes after that. But, a minute and a half—90 seconds—was what happened to him.

He recounted having vivid dreams during the procedure, startling extraordinary visions. I asked what they were like and he paused. "You ever see What Dreams May Come?"

Yes. Yes, I had.

"Exactly like that."

 

"But without the dog."

* Part of the reason for that vividness is the film stock that Ward used making the film, Fuji
Velvia film, known among photographers for its color reproduction properties. The colors pop out on the screen and are some of the most beautiful, fanciful images ever to grace a theater screen, an extreme example of what can be accomplished with the twin media of art and science. Isn't that what photography, boiled down to its basics, is?

Now I've Seen Everything Dept: I Am Legend (s)

"Come Out, Ne-ville! Coooome Ouuuut!"


                          

I have been in love with Richard Matheson's 1954 novel "I Am Legend" since I first read it in high school. A horror/sci-fi story, it tells of a world-wide plague that turns the world's populace into either corpses or vampires, except for the one man who carries the immunity from the disease, and who spends his days hunting the infected, and his nights being hunted by them.  

The images played out on the pages are searing, and Matheson's romantic way of writing the isolation of being "The Last Man on Earth" palpable. Plus, it has one ingenious kicker that makes the whole idea a perfect conceit that resonates and makes the story such a brilliant concept. It is literally mind-bending and perception-altering.

It has been filmed three times, each version having its own strengths (lead performances, always—what actor wouldn't want to play a role so dominant to the movie?) and weaknesses, but none of the them really coming to the heart (er, so to speak) of the story.

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona/Sidney Salkow, 1964) Vincent Price stars as Dr. Robert Morgan, the last survivor of a plague that has turned the majority of the Earth's population into vampires. By day, he lathes a number of wooden stakes and hunts down the creatures, driving the stakes into their hearts to kill them. This is the the closest the movies have come to Matheson's original concept, although the ending is changed, making Morgan an ersatz Christ-figure*, impaled by a spear in a church, his arms flung wide in a crucifixion pose. Made in Italy on the cheap, The Last Man on Earth is still a satisfying film merely for the strength of the ideas, the dusky black and white cinematography and Price's excellent performance. But don't take my word for it--you can download it or stream it here. It's been in the Public Domain for years (although MGM has come out with a nicely re-mastered version on DVD).

The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) Army Colonel Dr. Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) survives a world-wide plague as a result of a biological war between the Chinese and Soviets. Holed up in a bunkered apartment in Los Angeles he leads a solitary life: by day blasting the mutated victims with his high-powered, high-intensity-beamed assault rifle; by night listening to their taunts, armored against their organized attacks. The mutants are light-sensitive albino's, banded together as a sort of political/sociological cult ("The Family"), led by a zealot named Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who see Neville as a threat to their way of life, and well, yeah, that's a pretty effective rifle he hauls around. Using his own blood's immunity, he's trying to bring back the pigment-challenged. One of Heston's interesting forays into sociological sci-fi in the 70's, The Omega Man lays it on a little thick and heavy with the race-relations metaphor, but the cast is uniformly excellent especially Heston and Rosalind Cash. Again with the Christ-allegory as Neville is impaled in a fountain, arms floating out in a crucifixion pose while giving his life-saving blood to the rag-tag band trying to carry on his work. Though not strictly Matheson, it does reflect the times in which it was made.

 

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) and his German Shepherd Sam are the last surviving unaffected Manhattan residents of a plague brought on by a mutating vaccine. All the bridges have been destroyed in an attempt to halt the disease which has become airborne. Neville is unaffected. Animals, only by contact. And the two cruise the car-jammed streets looking for food, and trying to make their way through the entire DVD inventory at the local video store. At noon, he and Sam go to the South Street Seaport, waiting for someone--anyone to respond to his broadcast plea.

"My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City. I am broadcasting this message on all AM frequencies. I will be at the South Street Seaport every day, at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. I can provide food. I can provide security. I can provide shelter. If there is anyone out there. Anybody. Please. **

You are not alone."

He has been waiting in his private hell for three years.

The effects work of a deserted Manhattan is nothing short of astonishing and several shots of Neville tracking deer in his Mustang GT500 are played out to please any action aficionado. Kudos to director Lawrence (who managed to salvage a good movie out of Constantine against all odds). Smith is amazing throughout this movie. He's the only game in town, literally, and he is extraordinarily frugal in what he displays throughout the first two-thirds of this movie. His rituals, his by-play with Sam, his clinging to normalcy, and his studied work ethic never give a hint that he's cracking up. Flashbacks in moments of unconsciousness are the only indication of his loss and his desperate feelings of responsibility. At some point, something's got to snap.

When they do, they take the movie with it. Oh, things are intriguing for a good long time after that, and it appears that everything's fine--it's a bit like the plague really. But at some point, it becomes a confused muddle, story-wise and philosophy-wise, and that I place squarely at the hands of script-"doctor" Akiva Goldsman.***

Warning! Quarantine Zone!
Stand by for a retinal scan and display your ticket stub! This quadrant infected with Viral Spoilers! If you have not seen the movie, proceed no further!! I repeat, proceed no further!!!

First, let's back-track to the novel. In Matheson's original story, Neville discovers that not all the contaminated inhabitants have been turned vampiric. Some have been merely rendered sensitive to light, and during his daytime raids, Neville has killed a bunch of them. A representative from this group infiltrates his stronghold, and fills him in, telling him that he is now considered on the same scale as the the vampires of legend, coming to their houses in their sleep and killing them. Neville is eventually captured and sentenced to die for his crimes.  In his cell, waiting to be executed, he ponders the irony that, now, he is the legend of death, not the ones he was hunting down.

Pretty dang bleak. But a fascinating concept, and a mind-bender of a story-turn. But nobody's done it like that. In the films Neville dies, but always as the sacrificing Christ-figure who can one day restore the Human Race. Not the book. In the book, the Human Race is dead. Changed forever. No going back. And the last man of earth, the ancient old-guard, is the new source of horror. But the movies won't go that far—there's always got to be a glimmer of hope that the blood of the Savior can save Humanity.

Now, back to this latest movie. Things go swimmingly the first two-thirds of it, but things begin to snap after Neville rather ingeniously captures a female mutant to test his vaccine on (GA Series 319, compound 6, trivia-buffs). He makes a report that the mutants**** (standing in for Matheson's vampires) have stopped showing any sign of human behavior. Then he's immediately proven wrong in the most elaborate way possible--they emulate his own Rube Goldberg trap. Nothing is made of Neville's obvious miscalculation. By this time, his grief is too great and he's not thinking. And the movie is going someplace else and not using The Scientific Method doing it.

He is rescued at a very opportune time by two other survivors, who have heard his radio message and take him back to his apartment. All well and good. Something has to give in this version of the scenario or there's no forward momentum. The woman tells him that God directed her to him to take him to a Survivor Stronghold in Vermont, to which Neville (no doubt because he's a scientist) gives her the statistics of the disease (90% dead, a few percent mutant, who eat the immune-which when you think about it, might cure them, but no such luck) telling her that with such an effective kill-rate that there can't be a God, and that we did it to ourselves, thank you very much.***** She then replies that its easier to hear God when it's so much quieter (sounds like Goldsman with the happy-meal schizophrenia, again).

So, what happens? The mutants storm Neville's strong-hold for the Third Act Attack--a staple of any action movie, and our plucky survivors head for the fairly impregnable lab, where it becomes quite apparent that Mutant #1 is going to break through the glass to get to his souless-mate. Neville grabs his vaccine, gives it to the other survivors and tells them if they find the Survivor Stronghold to give 'em that blood sample--that un-refrigerated, bound-to-go-bad blood sample--to further his work, sticks 'em in a secret hidey-culvert and tells them to leave when it's light. Then he blows himself up with a grenade and takes the mutants with him, because, as we all know from watching the news, suicide-bombing is the very epitome of heroism these days.******

Fade to Black. Our two survivors end up at the fortress-walls of the survivor colony. What will they find when they get there? More mutants? A blasted Statue of Liberty in the sand? Harrison Ford and Sean Young in that other ill-considered feel-good ending to a sci-fi movie? No, the door opens on an idyllic little town with a Main Street, and in the background a white church-steeple with a bonging bell. They've come just in time for services, it appears. And hopefully the guards with the machine guns won't force them to attend.

What we have here is one step beyond using Neville as a Christ-allegory. It's a pro-religion/anti-science zombie movie. If the Vatican was "consoled" by The Golden Compass's soft opening, they must be positively spilling wine on their cassocks celebrating over this one!

As good as it starts out, this one takes "I Am Legend" so much farther afield from its source material than the others, that I can't be happy about it. Smith is great. The abandoned Manhattan scenes are amazing. But...

The script obliterates a great book for another hokey feel-good ending. After all, isn't that how you're supposed to feel after a devastating plague with a 90% kill-ratio? The film ends with a Bob Marley tune (kudos to that, but Marley is used for another confused metaphor that in the context of the film is just stupid). Maybe they should've ended with a rousing up-beat group-sing of "Tomorrow" from "Annie."

Gloriosky in the highest.

* I could do a few dozen pages on "Christ-allegories-in-the-movies," but let's just point out a few of them: E.T., the Extra-terrestrial, Cool Hand Luke, The Star Wars films, Braveheart, Narnia (of course), Blade Runner, The Superman films (especially.."Returns"), The Matrix, and ad infinitum spiritu.

** In just one of the beautiful touches in his performance, Smith's voice cracks on that one word only. 

*** The name "Akiva Goldsman" on a writing or producing credit is enough to spoil any movie-going experience for me, although I have always given the benefit of the doubt--but than as I'm sure Goldsman would tell me, repeating any behavior expecting an outcome that never occurs is a sign of insanity. It was Goldsman who destroyed the first "Batman" movie franchise with his cartoonish, pun-heavy scripts. He "cracked" the script for A Beautiful Mind by reassuring movie-goers that schizophrenia was nothing more than delusions of grandeur with visions of Ed Harris and Paul Bethany included--forget any unpleasantness. His by-the-numbers adaptation of The DaVinci Code made it boring for anyone who read the book, and breezily incomprehensible for anyone who didn't. His scripts for Practical Magic and Lost in Space are overworked humorless muddles. And I, Robot had one good, recycled and paranoid idea in its empty little head and chucked the great ones of Isaac Asimov. I'm not sure "whose windows he's washing" to be so successful with so much hack-work in his resume, but the man is the 21st Century Joe Eszterhas.

**** I've been calling them Danny Boyle "Red Bull" zombies, as they have the same out-sized aggressive energy as Boyle's 28 Days Later zombies, but with a case of the energy drink in them. They are pigment-less, hairless albino's who start to burn at the first touch of sun, and during the day they apparently huddle in dark spaces and huff and puff spasmodically. And they screech a lot, with distended CGI-enhanced faces. So, they're basically vampires, but zombies have a higher "Q" rating, so they're called zombies. 

***** I will say, however, that how the mutating disease comes to be is not only a plausible scenario, but wickedly likely.

****** Ah, but wait.  This ending was a substitute for the one that didn't "test" well with preview audiences.  Evidently, they wanted more action, even if that action was ultimately destructive to the point of the story and hewed closely to the endings of the other adaptations. ("Hey, dude, just blow something up!").  Here is the original ending to the latest I Am Legend, where Neville does indeed have a perception-altering experience, and realizes that...maybe he was wrong.