I Am Omega (2007)

• Directed by Griff Furst
• Written by Geoff Meed
• Starring
  • Mark Dacascos
  • Geoff Meed
  • Jennifer Lee Wiggins
  • Ryan Lloyd
  • Joshua William Schlegel
• Produced by David Michael Latt
• Executive produced by David Rimawi

Production company The Asylum specialized for several years in “mockbusters” — movies of similar title and storyline (or at least poster concept) to a touted studio blockbuster, released direct to video to coincide with the larger movie’s theatrical release. As much as studios impotently gnash their teeth at that, I can’t say I feel much sympathy for them; looking back on The Asylum’s mockbuster output for the last five years, most of the tentpole movies whose promotion they piggybacked have been remakes, sequels, or adaptations of other media (bestselling novels, comic books, video games, TV series, and at least one amusement park ride). So it’s not like The Asylum is besmirching their artistic originality with crass ripoffs; they’re just ripping off the studios’ own licensed leeching.

It helps The Asylum do their work, in fact, when the studio movie they’re imitating is based on a pre-existing property, because then the inmates (see what I did there?) have a good idea of what, exactly, they’re trying to imitate. (They usually have these out to video stores the week before the blockbuster hits the theaters, remember, so they don’t have the luxury of actually seeing the movie beforehand.) The Asylum knew exactly the sources for Will Smith’s I Am Legend (2007): Richard Matheson’s book of the same title, the 1964 film adaptation The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, and the 1971 film adaptation The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston. The production history even gave The Asylum a roadmap for safe copyright passage: just change the plot of The Omega Man as much as The Omega Man changed the plot of the novel I Am Legend, and they’d be far enough away from the source material that they wouldn’t owe fees to anyone!

Thus, the last man in the world this time out is Mark Dacascos (oh, how his star must have fallen), and the city in question is unnamed but clearly Los Angeles. And the infestation/disease/what have you? Bloody, raw-skinned zombie types; when shirts allow, they show an exposed spinal column, which is cool in and of itself. (The credits lists them as “zombies,” but they clearly aren’t technically the standard living dead, as they react to bullet wounds and other injuries as live humans do; the FAQ which the producers helpfully put up on the IMDb distinctly says they are living, disease-riddled humans, but if I accepted that, I’d disqualify I Am Omega from appearing in Month of the Living Dead, which I’m not prepared to do. So zombies it is.) And where did the contagion come from? Beats me; it’s never mentioned. All I can tell is that it’s spread by bodily fluids; Dacascos keeps a bottle in his pocket – rubbing alcohol, I presume – with which he washes himself any time an encounter with a zombie turns bloody. Not only is he not immune, he’s not working on any sort of cure for the plague, which is a story angle added to all three of the “official” adaptations of the Matheson novel.

Heh. Who knew that Double Dragon was going to be the HIGH point of Dacascos’ career?

So if he’s not working on a cure, what does he do with his time? Well, he has a house well-guarded with chain link fence and barbed wire, and he drives out through the country and into the city, placing explosive charges on natural gas lines. There is a large “hive” of zombies in the center of downtown, and his plan is to blow up the entire city to wipe them out. I don’t think it would really work that way – explosions are used to extinguish a natural gas fire, actually – but I’ll give it points for originality, I guess.

He also spends his time trying not to remember his wife (Jennifer Lee Wiggins) and son (Joshua William Schlegel), whom we saw in the prologue. Thanks to some poor filmmaking, though, we didn’t know that they were those people; in fact, from the way that the scene cut from the boy being grabbed to Dacascos waking up in bed, I thought that the boy was actually supposed to be him, and that a couple of decades had passed since the zombie apocalypse. (And the kid must have been adopted, because there’s no way that such a Caucasian-looking child came from a union of mixed Occidental-Oriental Dacascos and half-Chinese Wiggins.)

You might have noticed that I’ve not named Dacascos’ character. That’s because, for the longest time, he has no name. It’s just him, after all, and only the briefest of flashbacks show him on a swingset with his son – nothing in which his name is called to clue us in. When we finally find out that his name is “Renchard,” I giggled.

The number of tanning beds in California prove to be its undoing.

Let’s see, what else does he do? Aside from busting the chops of the random zombies he encounters – either by machine gun, machete, or good ol’-fashioned hand-to-hand – he also goes quietly insane. You may think that the setup I’ve described doesn’t owe an especial amount to The Omega Man, but an early scene in which Renchard can’t stop hearing radio broadcasts even after he unplugs the radio and screams, “There is no radio!” mirrors a scene at the start of The Omega Man in which Neville hallucinates all the telephones in the city ringing and screams, “There are no phones!”

After half an hour of solo post-apocalyptic manliness, the rest of the plot shows up. Someone is trying to contact him on his laptop, sending a video feed. Yes, that means that both telephones and electricity are still working; the latter is especially obvious, and no effort is made to disguise it. That same FAQ on the IMDb claims that the power grid could continue functioning without human control for quite a long time, which is a lie; I did some research once, calling the power company for veracity, and was told that the power grid would survive 48 hours tops without human babying before a cascade took down practically all of the electricity in the nation. (Come for the insightful movie criticism, stay for the post-apocalyptic trivia!) Of course, apart from anything spun in the FAQ, the real reason is that it’s a lot easier to just say, “The power’s still on,” than try to swing scheduled power interruptions on city streets and in parking garages on this budget.

All alone… so, so alone… without even a Gorn to fight…

Anyway. He is consternated by the transmission, but finally accepts it – and falls out of his chair in amazement at the woman on the screen! Why? Yet again, that FAQ clues us in: she’s a dead ringer for his dead wife (in fact, the two are played by the same actress). That’s great, but we only saw her briefly in low light at the beginning of the movie (when we didn’t know she was his wife), and the image on the video feed is naturally distorted a bit, so it’s not a connection that most viewers would make, I think, and since it’s never actually mentioned in the movie (except that later Renchard mentions obliquely that she reminds him of someone he once knew), it looks like the FAQ is desperately trying to cover for poor filmmaking.

Anyway (yet again). Her name is Briana, and she was part of a convoy of survivors moving from the south to a place in the mountains called Antioch, where there is supposedly a survivor colony. They got attacked when they stopped in the city for supplies, and she’s the only survivor of the survivors. Any way that Renchard could come and rescue her? Um, no, he says, and closes the laptop. (How did she know he was out there and send him the video feed in the first place? I’ll explain: Shut up.)

But later, two fellows show up at his door – the Mormon missionaries finally tracked him down. No! Wait! They’re not missionaries, they’re couple of rednecks from Antioch, Vincent (Geoff Meed, the screenwriter) and Mike (Ryan Lloyd), who might or might not have a Brokeback Mountain thing going on. They intercepted Briana’s transmission to Renchard (I said shut up, and I mean shut up!), and want his help rescuing her. Not only is she hot and young and potentially breedable, but she’s also the only known naturally immune person, and her blood might help create a serum. (You knew that immunity had to enter into it sometime, right?)

And then because Renchard still doesn’t want to help, they blow up his house with a rocket launcher to persuade him. Dale Carnegie would have been so proud of these two…

So the three of them set out through the sewers to downtown to rescue Briana. Apart from the danger she’s in from all the zombies, the city is set to blow in less than 48 hours. The suspense! Can you stand it?

It’s a good thing that the last surviving female in these movies is always a hottie.

Like most of The Asylum’s output, I Am Omega looks like a professionally-made rush job – cheap, but competent, but wholly unambitious. Largely handheld cinema work and good lighting keep it from looking amateurish, but the lack of dollies and cranes keep it from disguising its budget. For a movie which carefully keeps it small, Dacascos is a well-chosen leading man: he’s photogenic, and actually proves himself a competent actor in all of the solo scenes in the first 30 minutes, but he’s not an expansive or large than life – not like Price, or Heston, or Smith. Dacascos would have seemed lost in any of their movies (especially the last two), and any of the three would have smothered I Am Omega by being that much bigger than the production.

This is, however, one of those movies with a twist near the end that makes no sense. Spoiler: It turns out that Vincent and Mike aren’t actually from Antioch; they’re ex-military survivalists who think that the world’s a better place with the weak weeded out, and they want Briana to die so her immunity can’t be used to make a serum. So why did they bother with all of it? They knew Renchard had declined to rescue her on his own; why didn’t they just leave everything alone and let her be killed eventually by zombies? Or, if they were worried about Renchard changing his mind and rescuing her after all, why didn’t they just blow Renchard up along with his house, or shoot him in the back once they were underway? The post-zombie world may belong to the strong, but that doesn’t mean they’re smart. /spoiler

We’re also meant to believe that Renchard can push-start a car with a dead battery with three bullets in him (it looks like two in the arms and one in a leg), after which he manages several roundhouse kicks. I know action heroes have a tradition of “walking it off” after they’re injured, but this is ridiculous!

Heh. Who knew that The Crow: Stairway to Heaven was going to be the HIGH point of Dacascos’ career?

The Asylum’s business strategy can be a two-edged sword. If the mockbuster they produce is utter crap, they’ve merrily put one over on the viewing public; if the blockbuster on which they’ve based their movie turns out itself to be utter crap (which has happened more than once – remember, they’ve got no more idea than we do whether a studio movie is going to flop), then their mockbuster can look good by comparison. But if, like I Am Omega, the result is moderately watchable brainless entertainment, it can suffer in comparison with its big-budget analog, coming out lower in the viewer’s estimation than it would it it were released without the blockbuster baggage.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2 (plus a bazillion)
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Geoff Meed (Vincent) played “Dee’Ahn Male” in the Enterprise episode “Two Days and Two Nights” (and a couple of characters in the Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force videogame)