Film is Pwn

For those new to the site, Asylum Studios specializes in making low-budget movies along similar themes to big budget movies with questionably similar titles, and releasing them on DVD in conjunction with the big budget release.  As Transmorphers was to Transformers, I Am Omega is to the 2007 Will Smith blockbuster I Am Legend.

Not unlike its cinematic forebearers, I Am Omega involves an individual who is seemingly the last survivor of a worldwide plague that turned at least some of its victims into zombies.  Our hero is Richard, perhaps an homage to the classic author Richard Matheson who wrote the novel “I Am Legend”.  To fully appreciate the cheekiness of dubbing the knock-off “I Am Omega,” you must know the previous incarnation of the Matheson tome was the Omega Man starring Charlton Heston.  (And before that was VIncent Price in The Last Man on Earth, which I happen to think was the best adaptation, but that’s just me.)  Sadly the filmmakers couldn’t complete their vision and find a dude named Smill With to play the “Last Legendary Omega Man Who I Am”, so they settled on Mark Dacascos, star of Kickboxer 5.  And if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, the best Kickboxer movie was Kickboxer 5, though we all have high hopes for Kickboxer vs. Cardio Boxer.
Richard (Dacascos) loses his wife and child in one of those pesky zombie apocalypses, as we see in the scary intro, and we catch up with him where lives years later in an isolated, lightly guarded house that is regularly besieged by zombies at night.  The filmmakers may not have had the budget for a more realistic abode, as Richard’s house is plastered with fully intact glass windows and glass doors, and apparently these zombies don’t have the mental acumen or physical coordination to throw things, though they are doggone good at sneaking.  Protecting Richard’s abode is a acute alarm and a chain link fence (with modest sampling of barb wire), a rather meager safety net when you think about it being all that stands between Richard’s breathing and Richard’s becoming zombie chow.

Not unlike any one of the I Am Legend films, Richard is kinda kooky crazy, with dummies to keep him company.  But, *gasp* a lone woman reaches out to Richard for assistance in getting to a collection of survivors called Antioch, and somehow this woman’s blood may be the anti-virus!

My favorite part of the flick is that Richard, who has lived alone for so long the sight of another human freaks him out, gets this distress call over the Internet.  It is unclear a) how Richard still has electricity to power his laptop or b) how in the world this woman trapped in the nearby city knows how to contact Richard, or c) how either one of them has free Internet established YEARS into the post-zombie apocalypse.

Anyhoo, not only do we now have a damsel in distress and the possibility of saving the world, but also two redneck survivalist types who enlist Richard in helping them find the girl, but they a secret agenda to kill her.  Why?  It seems they don’t want the zombie era to end, because thanks to the zombies only the strong survive, and if we go back to the way it was the unfit won’t be eaten alive by the undead . . . which to them is a disincentive.  Uh . . . okay.  So Richard must battle his crippling shyness, a horde of zombies, two dopes in search of a lunatic militia, and save the woman who presumably can save the species.  Does he?  You know, I saw the film and I’m really not particularly sure what happened, but by golly I had a good time watching this train wreck!

–Daniel J. Roos can honestly say he’s never NOT enjoyed an Asylum movie yet.