I Am Omega

Indeed, "I Am Omega" is an "I Am Legend" knock-off from those copycats at The Asylum, but the Will Smith movie stank like three-day old tomatoes rotting in the sun with its pretentious plot about the last guy alive with recurring flashbacks about his family and the destruction of New York City. In "Universal Soldiers" director Griff Furst's low-budget,predictable, but exciting,straight-to-DVD, B-movie "I Am Omega," Renchard (Mark Dacascos of "Cradle 2 the Grave") is one of the last survivors of a mysterious pestilence that has mutated virtually everybody else into ravenous, bloodthirsty zombies. Renchard is holed up alone in a compound of a house in the mountains wired to an alarm system, barbed wire, and a satellite computer link. Thank God that he doesn't have a dog! He does, however, have a mannequin with which to interact. Anyway, one day Renchard receives an incoming video message on his lap-top from Brianna who has holed herself up in a laboratory in the city that he is trying to destroy because it has become a haven for zombies. Brianna (Jennifer Lee Wiggins of "Dracula's Curse") has a built-in resistance to the pestilence, and she is desperately trying to reach a sanctuary called Antioch. Repeatedly, she contacts Renchard, but he wants nothing to do with her because he is going crazy himself. It doesn't help matters that she resembles his late wife. When he isn't staring at photos of his family, he is killing zombies left, right, center, and sideways. By the way, the zombies look pretty nauseating which adds at least a star to this fast-moving, 85-minute Apocalyptic tale. "I Am Omega" is one of those horror movies where zombies spring out of nowhere to scare you with their ugly, hideous faces while blood dribbles down their lips. Daniel Maldondado's editing adds a visceral quality to their attacks. These zombies share little in common, for example, with the zombies that menaced Vincent Price in the original Richard Matheson movie. Those zombies staggered around, but these undead demons could be Olympic medal winners what with the way they scramble from here to there. Our physically fit hero uses his combat skills with automatic weapons and his martial arts prowness, but he is like Custer at the Last Stand. These zombies keep popping up like dragon's teeth sown in the earth. Indeed, these feral combat scenes give this movie it's edge, and that edge escalates when a couple of normal but insane soldiers show up about 36 minutes into the action in a van at Richard's place one day. They convince him to lead them into the city so they can rescue Brianna. These guys, however, aren't completely honest with our resourceful hero. Mindless Asylum action galore with no science speculative or otherwise in sight predominats, but the adrenalin-laced hand-held camera-work salvages this nonsense. Actually, Alexander Yellen's photography is a notch above what you usually get from this kind of tripe. There's an amusing showdown in a high rise parking lot where our hero tries to crank a car while the zombies assemble behind him and he has to face them down alone with this kick-boxing skills. "I Am Omega" clearly is not for everybody's taste but it ranks as a better-than-average opus from Asylum. Nothing really surprising happens here, but Furst stages the action with a senes of style and gusto. The sympathetic Renchard (Dacascos in a good performance)and his woebegone plight along with the momentum in the action scenes partially redeems this derivative, one-dimensional slaughterhouse saga.

Yet another remake of I AM LEGEND has Mark Dascasvcos as one of very few humans left on our planet after some major catastrophe. Everyone else is now a flesh-eating zombie. Mark D. plays a former military type who is planting bombs around the city to take out as many zombies as possible. He also shoots and beats to death as many as his schedule allows. In the middle of everything, a distress call comes in and he finds a lone survivor in the heart of the city, a young female. He reluctantly embarks on a mission to save her, in the company of two other ex-military guys who show up seemingly out of the blue. Lots of decent fight scenes, as befitting the film's legendary kickboxing star. OMEGA is moody, well photographed and has a great first half that loses some steam in the second. The gore is cartoonish, and the goofy-looking zombies are clearly played by stuntmen in rubber monster suits. No harm done, assuming you can accept the lead in this umpteenth version of the Richard Matheson story being a kickboxing machine.

The production values on this title, given the obvious low budget, were surprisingly good. But what lets this film down is the completely run-of-the-mill paint-by-numbers script. The individuals behind it had all the tools they needed to make a somewhat interesting film, but just didn't bother with an imaginative/solid story. Worse still, the outcome is actually generally dull as well as unimaginative... So what we end up with is not a mediocre, poorly written film, but a boring and dull, mediocre, poorly written film. It's frustrating to think that a chance was lost here to make a watchable film because of the lack of some decent forethought at the scripting stage. One has to wonder if the producers were too busy calculating projected cash-in revenue (in making a film on the coat-tail of 'I Am Legend') instead of actually thinking what it should be about.

This isn't a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination but it's not bad and definitely a lot better than old jug ears effort. Here's why I'd rather watch this a million times than watch Will Smith doing his pitiful Shrek/nervous breakdown scene one more time. The people in this film aren't computer generated and though they don't look great they don't look like computer game bad guys skating over the floor. This is a definite improvement. In the odd scene they actually look quite good. It leaves the more philosophical aspects of the book and two films alone. Fair enough, it's not like we haven't seen it done and rather it was absent than messed up and garbled like Legend. There's a small amount of chemistry between the characters, in Legend there's all the spark of a pair of rubber gloves rubbing together. The characters are all pretty simple but they do have a personality of sorts, again a step up from Legend. Lastly the main character doesn't really express any emotions which is fair enough, I prefer that to the two faces Will Smith can pull off. You can accept a man who is totally robbed of emotion but it's harder to accept a man that only has two facial expressions and flicks through them and gets his movie described by some genius on here as "an acting buffet." It's not a perfect movie, some bits are a bit weak but I genuinely enjoyed it so give it a chance you might like it too. For a cheap rip off it's surprisingly entertaining.