Search - I Am Omega on DVD

And today's secret ingredient is... ZOMBIES!

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 05/14/2009

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I Am Omega (Griff Furst, 2006)

It's often crossed my mind over the years that Iron Chef America has been on the air that Kitchen Stadium looks an awful lot like the kind of place that has a secret network of bunkers beneath it that could house important people if some sort of major world disaster struck. I now have all the evidence I need, as it seems Chairman Kaga's nephew is the last man on Earth.

If you ever wondered what it would look like if the Shaw Brothers teamed up with Godfrey Ho to do an adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic (and much-adapted) novel I Am Legend, first off, I'd like to offer my condolences that you not only have far too much time on your hands, but that you also know who the Shaw Brothers are (and, even worse, who Godfrey Ho is). Second, I'd tell you to look no further, for it would look a lot like the dog of a movie. Mark Dacascos, who plays Kaga's fictional nephew on Iron Chef America, here plays Renchard, an analog of Robert Neville from the more faithful I Am Legend adaptations, but instead of a scientist looking for a cure for the disease that's swept the nation (and probably the world), here he's just trying to put an end to it, at least in his particular corner of the world (which is Oxnard, California), by blowing the city sky-high. Plans get complicated when he gets a distress call from Brianna, a woman trapped in the city (Jennifer Lee Wiggins, recently of the even worse The Bone Eater), and two would-be heroes from a supposed enclave of survivors in the mountains, Vincent and Mike (screenwriter Geoff Meed of Little Miss Sunshine and Ryan Lloyd of one of my favorite shorts of the last few years, Night of the Hell Hamsters), who have come to rescue her, but need Renchard's knowledge of the less-populated ways into the city.

As you can probably tell, this is an even looser "adaptation" of Matheson's book than Night of the Living Dead was, but where that film can obviously be taken on its own merits, there's nothing here to suggest that Meed and Furst wanted to create anything more than a cheap Shaw Brothers-style exploitation/action flick. And taken in that light, it's at least passable, in that there's a decent amount of action, and Jennifer Lee Wiggins, for all that she can't act her way out of a paper bag, is certainly easy on the eyes. And with that said, Wiggins is probably the strongest member of this cast. I liked Ryan Lloyd a whole lot better when all he had to do was wear a giant bunny suit and look threatening. Dacascos... well, the less said about his performance, the better. The only sympathy I could garner for him was having to go from having his meals prepared by the world's finest chefs to eating a whole lot of MREs. Not that any actors, no matter how talented, could have done a great deal with the painfully inept script handed to them. Furst's direction is competent (certainly more so than it was on the only other Furst-directed movie I've had the misfortune to see, Basilisk: The Serpent King), but nothing more than that. Not that better direction could have saved this mess.

For obvious reasons, it's a must-see for Iron Chef America fanatics. Everyone else can safely avoid wasting the ninety minutes of their lives they'd have otherwise spent watching this. * ½
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