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 SHOCK IT TO ME!, In conjunction with Landmark’s Clay Theater, are co-presenting a very special two-night, “Vincent Price Double Feature” event, boasting a pair of true horror classics dug up deep from the vaults of American International Pictures (courtesy of MGM), THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and TOMB OF LIGERIA. The double-feature (both films presented same night with intermission between features) will be presented on both Tuesday, October 27, and Wednesday, October 28, start time 7:00pm each night.
 THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
Directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow
The film that inspired “Night Of The Living Dead”!
From Night Of The Living Dead (1968) to Zombieland (2009), four decades of zombie-apocalypse movies have owed tribute to this relatively faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic novel, I Am Legend. Vincent Price stars as the sole survivor of a biological weapon that has transformed the entire human race into night dwelling vampires. Price gives an uncharacteristically understated performance, bringing a genuine sense weariness and disgust to the daily drudgery of survival.
Though lacking the budget to bring the novel fully to the screen, the film doesn’t retreat from the book’s downbeat ending, and Matheson’s inquiry into the point where hero becomes monster gets full play. In an atmosphere of global holocaust, the now-cliché scenes of shuffling undead laying siege to Price’s roughly barricaded home take second place to the stark, surreal shock of his hero donning a gas mask and tossing slaughtered vampires into a gapping, eternally flaming pit. (1964, 86 min, B&W, 35mm ‘Scope)
 TOMB OF LIGEIA
Directed by Roger Corman
Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic tale of love beyond the grave!
For this, the last of the Roger Corman/AIP Edgar Allen Poe pictures, director Corman and screenwriter, Robert Towne dreaded the prospect of returning to the studio-bound castles and artfully fog-shrouded graveyards that had defined the series since its beginning in House Of Usher (1960). So instead, they moved much of the action outdoors—the natural settings and waving shadows effectively breathing dark life into the story’s thick, cloying atmosphere of necrophilia and doomed passion.
Series stalwart, Vincent Price, stars as another typically tortured Poe figure, Verden Fell, a man obsessed by the certainty that his dead wife has returned in the form of a black cat, seeking to possess his new bride-to-be. British actress Elizabeth Shepard (originally cast as Emma Peel on The Avengers) expertly executes the dual role of both the malevolent Ligeia and threatened Rowena, showing both as strongly individualistic, with a bold streak of defiance, and defining the differences by vital degrees of humanity. Clad in binding black clothing, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, Fell mirrors the sensitivities and pathological unease of Roderick Usher, Price’s defining performance in the Poe series, bringing the cycle to an appropriate close. (1965, 81 min, Color, 35mm ‘Scope)
Film notes by SHOCK IT TO ME’s Michael Monahan
Landmark's Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore St, San Francisco.
Tuesday, October 27 & Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:00 PM (show includes both features)
Tickets are $10.00 general ($8.00 for student/senior/children under 12).
Advance tickets: https://tickets.landmarktheatres.com/
http://shock-it-to-me.com
Information: (415) 346-1124
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