You can't say this is a bad movie, cause it isn't. I've probably viewed it more times than I've had breakfasts's. It has cool, New Zealander, David Warbeck, a Jack Nicholson type of looking guy, a favourite of these type of cheesy overviolent exploitation flicks. And like many other of these type films, and this, the violence is over the top, just one of the assets to this Vietnam yarn, as well as great priceless tongue and cheek dialogue that always stays with me. It's timeless. It's start is curiously impressive, taking place in a bar/bordello, where one cocky vet pays the price for being too much of an arsehole, and rattling off his mouth, too much, which results in his shocking murder, where the steamed up shooter/vet, then blows his brains out. The bar soon becomes a fireball by attacking rockets. This sequence I must say, is beautifully filmed. This early section of story I found was the best. Some of the violence in this, as like many other of these exploitative flicks, I warn you, is not for the faint of heart. One example has a guy riding in a helicopter, when under attack. He cops it in the eye, where we're horribly subjected to an extreme close up, where the eyeball has totally gone, blood just filtering out of it's niche. The plot has Warbeck, as Captain Harry E Morris, who earns the movie's title by the end of the film. He's sent on a mission to blow up a radio transmitter, where he rendezvous with a collection of wild vets, and too, the last thing he needs, but gets, is a foreign correspondent reporter (Tisa Farrow from Fingers and the sister of the more widely known Mia Farrow). They encounter a lot of combat, where the number of the squad steadily decreases. Poor Farrow also encounter a group of horny vets from another squad. We're not expecting a Vietnam masterpiece, here, but this is the next best thing, if you want to throw realism out the window. There's also a scene familiar to The Deer Hunter in this, this one much more intense, where Harry literally has to keep to swatting off the rats with his shirt, where the other victim kept in the underground cage has surrendered. And here's a film you should surrender to. Cheesy exploitative cinema at it's best, a one man war in the lush jungles of Vietnams, with an added surprise near the end, you won't see in a million years, coming. I liked too the songs, themed or sung. The great Steiner has a guest role as the foul mouthed head of that other group of horny vets, a great performance I liked, and who Warbeck accidentally kill while operating a flame thrower in this madness of war.
Review of The Last Hunter
