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.