1980, Italy. Starring David Warbeck, Tisa Farrow, Tony King, Bobby Rhodes, John Steiner, Massimo Vanni, Margit Evelyn Newton, Luciano Pigozzi. Directed by Antonio Margheriti

Imagine, for a moment, that you were going to make Apocalypse Now, only you were going to do it with a budget of about $25 and some change. If you are lucky, the results could very well come out looking something like The Last Hunter, an Italian shoestring-budget rip-off of Apocalypse Now and assorted other "man on a mission" type war films. Because of a lack of talent, or at least a lack of hashish, you would be unable to come up with the twisted psychedelic imagery and symbolism of Apocalypse Now, so you'd go instead for more gratuitous violence and things blowing up. Of course, you don't have much money, so most of the things you blow up would be trees and coconuts, but that's neither here nor there.

Last Hunter is exactly what you expect it to be: a cheap, derivative, totally satisfying wartime action film. Hey, not everything can be deranged art from the feverish minds of a bunch of stoners in the jungle, so sometimes you just gotta settle for a war movie in which the basic plot is "guys run around and shoot each other while cursing and sweating." That's exactly what Last Hunter wants to be, and that's exactly what it is.

The movie starts off on the right foot by starring David Warbeck. Most people who know David Warbeck know him as the somewhat dim but good-hearted doctor from Lucio Fulci's supernatural zombie bloodbath, The Beyond. Fans of genre films know him as one of the coolest, friendliest guys ever to set foot in front of the camera or on the stage at a convention. Warbeck was famous for being a great guy, someone who had a sense of humor about his work but, at the same time, avoided being condescending toward it, always exhibiting respect for the genres and their fans. He never got full of himself or became "too important" for the fun horror and action films of his past. He knew his role, knew it well, and relished it. B-movie fans lost a tremendous fellow when Warbeck died of cancer.

Warbeck plays a very Martin Sheen-esque army captain named Morris who is given a mission: go up a river and destroy a radio tower that is being used to broadcast around the clock anti-American propaganda. I've always thought it would be much simpler to not send the mission to destroy the radio tower, and instead just tell everyone not listen to whatever channel was broadcasting the anti-American hate messages. But I suppose if you have to chose between "Go home yankee GI" or Robin Williams screaming at you and doing his "gay guy" voice and his "southern preacher" voice for ten hours a day, you'd welcome the Vietcong propaganda network.

The movie begins with a cool slow-burn segment set in a brothel. One of Morris' buddies is starting to freak out as a result of the combined effects of too much war and too many drugs. Just when things seem to simmer down a bit, he goes totally nuts and opens fire on everyone, including himself. It lets you know right away that while this may not be the artiest war film you'll ever see, it sure isn't going to go down without a very bloody fight.

Morris leaves for his mission in a departure that doesn't seem all that thought out. The mission hits its first snag when he jumps out of a helicopter into the river and is immediately foiled in his attempts to climb ashore by a very small but determined snake. Damn godless Commie VC snakes! After losing most of his equipment and valuable time, David bests the diminutive reptile by doggy paddling a little ways down and getting out of the river there. Along the way he manages to lose just about all his equipment. Score one for America, baby!

Morris soon meets up with the small squadron of poorly dubbed soldiers, including one ARVN soldier named, wittily enough, Hu Phlung Dung, and a female war correspondent played by none other than Tisa Farrow, another Fulci alumnist (she was in Zombie) and the larger breasted of the Farrow sisters. Tisa enjoyed fame and we all enjoyed her nudity in countless Italian exploitation films while her more respectable sister had sex with Woody Allen. Now seriously, which one would you rather hang out with?

As the merry band traipses through the jungle, they discover a bunch of rotting American pilots. This being an Italian film, the camera does not miss the opportunity to zoom lovingly in on the oozing wounds and decaying flesh. See, that's the grim, gritty reality of war. If this had been a Fulci film, the corpses would have attacked, and we would have had ourselves one of those Weird War Tales type movies. I always wondered why there weren't more of these. As a kid, I was always entranced and terrified by the covers to these comic books, which always seemed to involve some American soldier hiding in a trench while a bunch of skeletons in tattered Nazi uniforms marched by. Seems to me to be obvious fodder for a fairly ass-kicking horror/action film, but no one really ever seized on them.

Okay, you had that weird slew of "zombie Nazis rising from the lake" movies, but that's not really the same thing.

Anyway, this is all a rather moot point, as these bodies don't do anything but hang there looking gross. So it's off to a village where they can have a big ol' shoot-out with the forces of Communism. Lots of stuff explodes and there's at least one spot where a guy gets shot so his buddy can avenge him by yelling, "Mutha fuckahs!" as he goes apeshit with his M-16. This seems to happen about every ten minutes and is the sure sign of an idea well that has run dry. Just have your guy shout "mutha fuckahs!" and cut loose with his machine, possibly in slow motion. It's a surefire way to give your movie that extra emotional impact that is lost if your guy shouts something else, like "Poo-poo heads!" while leveling a village.

Whatever the case may be, it doesn't quite achieve the same sense of creeping insanity that was achieved in Apocalypse Now with scenes like "Chef freaks out over the tiger," but it's still more entertaining than Saving Private Ryan's nine million "Ed Burns gives a sassy speech" scenes. Allow me to take a moment to comment on how much I didn't care for that movie: I didn't care for that movie. Not one bit. No sir. It garners its entire reputation from the admittedly exhillerating opening sequence, but after that it becomes an incredibly predictable rehash of every World War II movie ever, right down to the "sassy guy from Brooklyn" and the German soldier they free out of compassion who comes back to kill them later, and even the "timid peaceful young guy who learns that sometimes you must kill." Write it off as satire if you want; I say there's more originality in the cheap ol' Last Hunter than there was in the over-blown, over-praised Saving Private Ryan. Plus, Last Hunter starred David Warbeck.

Okay, so the opening battle was pretty cool, but that's about it.

Anyway, back to the movie at hand. After blowing a lot of stuff up, our merry little band heads to an army outpost that, once again, is supposed to remind us of the insane outpost at the Do Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now. Once again, it doesn't quite work. The outpost commander is John Waters, or at least a guy who looks quite a bit like him, which is probably why all the soldiers are crazy. I don't care how much you like his movies, if you are trapped in the jungle taking orders from John Waters, you're probably not going to come out of it with your mind intact, especially when he introduces you to your new leader, Captain Divine.

Most of the insanity manifests itself in social functions like taunting the VC by running after coconuts, threatening to rape Tisa Farrow, and doing a whole lot of drinking. The base is mostly a series of tunnels, caves, and underground bunkers, and when the Vietcong tunnel their way in, all hell breaks loose once again. There's a huge battle in the tunnels, with just about everyone getting shot all to hell except, of course, for David Warbeck and the black guy who shouts "mutha fuckah!" all the time, which he does on at least a dozen occasions during this fight. Tisa survives, too, but is captured by the VC. Warbeck and his last remaining soldier make their way down to the river and hop in a boat which floats very slowly, with no weapons or armor, down the water, which seems not to be the best mode of transportation when both banks are lined with well-armed North Vietnamese soldiers. I guess moves like this are why we lost the war.

Warbeck finally ditches the boat and heads out to the radio tower on foot, while the black guy props himself up with his machine gun and eventually gets killed because, well, he was floating slowly down the river in a very flammable boat in an area totally controlled by the enemy. About all he needed to do was hoist the Stars and Stripes and belt out "America the Beautiful." Instead, he goes out with guns a-blazin', his last words being "mutha fuckahs!" If I gotta go, and I am one of those people who answers the question "Do you want to live forever?" with a very simple, "Well, yeah," I at least want to go while shooting off a machine gun and yelling "mutha fuckahs!" even if I am in a room all by myself.

David Warbeck reaches the base where the radio tower is located and promptly gets captured since it's not a Vietnam exploitation movie without one scene of a guy in one of those bamboo cages hanging halfway in the river full of rats and leeches. Tisa is at this camp as well, but she's bought herself some time to come up with a plan by promising to "tell their story to the world." She then manages to free David, who goes out to complete his mission, only to discover, in a shocking twist of events, that the voice of propaganda is his old girlfriend! No, seriously! She's not even Vietnamese; she's just some Commie, spoiled-rich white girl. We then have to hear the whole long story about how back in "the world," they all planned to make a stand against the government and their unjust war, but David sold out and didn't burn his draft card, so on and so forth. The movie hasn't exactly been realistic up to this point, but this is really stretching things a bit. Oh well, at least it wasn't his evil twin with a goatee.

The Last Hunter will not go down in the annals of cinematic history as the greatest war movie of all time. No one will watch it, nod grimly, and mutter, "That's the way it was." What they will do, instead, is howl wildly and laugh a hearty laugh. It ain't art, but it is action-packed and entertaining. David Warbeck doesn't do much other than look tired and confused, but he manages to get by on charisma alone. He does a good job with a meatless role. Everyone else, especially the crazy captain who looks like John Waters and the black guy who yells a lot, are about ten miles over the top, but it fits perfectly in a movie this completely silly. We're not really looking at an exploration of man's journey into the darkness of his own soul. We're mostly looking at guys shooting things and yelling. This is a simple-minded, bloody action film. That's all it wants to be, and it delivers in a completely satisfying way.

Antonio Margheriti directs with gusto, and what he lacks in originality and budget, he more than compensates for with relentless action and gore. Margheriti was a fairly accomplished Italian action director, with a number of cool crime and spaghetti western films to his name, including another "Vietnam" film, Cannibal Apocalypse, in which John Saxon and a friend return from Vietnam to discover they've contracted a virus that causes them to have an insatiable appetite for human flesh! Margheriti's direction shines during the film's many action sequences, and he holds nothing back. The remainder of the film is filled with over-the-top shenanigans, so while things are never very believable, they're always fun. Actually, given how the whoel world has become totally neurotic and whiney, I guess over-the-top scene-chewing actually is pretty realistic.

You obviously can't take this movie very seriously. I mean, the shock ending is that the soldier's old girlfriend from America is the voice of Communism in Vietnam. How did she even get that job? And why was anyone listening to her in the first place? Oh yeah, their other choice was Robin Williams. But still! This movie throws every cliche possible at you, including guys dying in slow-motion while their buddies try in vain to save them. To the film's credit, it takes every cliche and turns it up to about eleven, making the whole thing so wildly over the top that you are quick to forget the lack of originality and feasibility and simply sit back and enjoy the mayhem.

I had no intention of taking this movie very seriously. All I wanted was a violent, action-packed shoot-em-up, and that's exactly what I got. On that level, The Last Hunter is totally satisfying and enjoyable. It shows us that war is hell, men are grim, and sucking chest wounds, unlike this movie, are not very much fun.

Labels: Action: War, Director: Antonio Margheriti, Stars: David Warbeck, Year: 1980