'THE LAST HUNTER'........DAWSON'S SHRIEK......ANTONIO'S PASTA APOCALYPSE...

The Last Hunter (1980)   Oh my, how a movie like this sets us to pine for those early, seat-of-our-pants days of videocassettes and Mom 'n Pop video stores.......

          ..........when watching a videocassette movie in your own home was such a fresh, exciting novelty, that you'd even sit down and watch a batshit crazy bottom-of-the-barrel Italian Grindhouse bucket 'o sludge like this one.......

             First, let us salute the Roger Corman of Italian shlock, the amazingly prolific director Antonio Margheriti, who tirelessly pumped out exploitation trash of every genre.......sword and sandal epics, giallo slashers, sci-fi swashbucklers, sword and sorcery fantasies.......and his ultimate specialty, cheesy knockoffs of whatever blockbuster movie played in theaters last month.....

              Antonio's gloriously sleazy filmography finally invaded the United States via direct-to-cassette release under his American-ized name, 'Anthony M. Dawson'. 

              And for all of us lovers of deeply guilty pleasure cinematic garbage, he and his films were a dream come true......

             For the BQ, Margheriti-Dawson achieved the very heights of delirium with "The Last Hunter", his off-the-rails, lunatic mish-mash of both "The Deer Hunter" with "Apocalypse Now".......which you can think of the earliest attempt to fashion the kind of blatantly imitative "mockbuster" that Asylum Films became famous for......

              No, you won't find any political sub-text in this Vietnam tale of an Army Captain (David Warbeck) whose mission to seek out and destroy a "Hanoi Hannah" propaganda DJ descends into rivers of battle gore.

               Margheriti's got only two agendas on his mind here......plucking out any usable plot ideas he can rip off from "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now".....and presenting a non-stop orgy of lip-smackin' Vietnam carnage......booby trap impalings, machine gunnings, flamethrower immolations, disembowelings.....all liberally spiced with extreme close-ups of ripped intestines and destroyed, wounded blood-oozing flesh.

              As the infamous Little Rascals cannibal might say....."Yum Yum...Eat 'em up..."

              Halfway through the movie, Warbeck's tortuous jungle mission lands him among a lost platoon of soldiers living out a drug and booze-addled existence in a what we guess are supposed to be abandoned Cambodian cave temples, complete with statues carved into the walls.  This constitutes the film's loopy mash-up of both the Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando sequences in "Apocalypse Now", with actor John Steiner playing an amalgam of both characters.

               The Viet Cong, no doubt functioning as outraged film critics, promptly overrun the place, instigating a spectacular, Margheriti-ized display of death and destruction.

               Never fear......Warbeck manages to reach his objective at long last, along with the only other survivor of his merry band, a vacant-eyed, barely awake photo journalist played by Tisa Farrow, the barely awake, vacant-eyed sister of Mia.  (Tisa hardly registers a pulse or a recognizable emotion......even when the Cave Temple soldiers get ready to gang rape her.....)

                And at this point, the movie springs its one WTF plot twist......as Warbeck comes face to face with the radio propagandist who's been cooing suggested surrender to our boys, poisoning the airwaves with Communist shmooze.  Take it from us, it's a doozy........

              So we humbly ask your forgiveness if we fondly remember our Jurassic-era video store days.......when, if we'd rented out all our copies of "The Natural" and "Sixteen Candles", customers would settle for "The Last Hunter" and still walk out of the store satisfied........at least they'd have something to stick in that marvelous new suitcase-sized VCR that night.

              We took it home one night too......and as connoisseurs of the signature craziness of Antonio 'Anthony M. Dawson' Margheriti, we savored every idiotic minute of it. 3 stars (***).....and that rating's strictly judged on its Grindhouse goodness.......(if we applied any sane criteria to rate this movie, it would probably land in the high minus numbers......so proceed at your own risk......)