The Last Hunter

The Last Hunter (Hunter Of The Apocalypse, L’ Ultimo Cacciatore) Directed By Antonio Margheriti. Starring David Warbeck.

            This is an Antonio Margheriti Nam flick that I would like to forget, it’s pretty dreadful. All the right ingredients are here for something epic, so why does it crash and burn? Everyone from Tisa Farrow to David Warbeck comes off soggy and confused, stuck in the jungles of derivative misery. According to Wiki, this one is classified in the subgenre of “Macaroni Combat” (The film term that makes me giggle like a kindergartener, it reminds me of "Pasta Yacht", the one I coined)! I'm a big fan of Mr. Margheriti and he is better than this wretched film. It was made to cash in on The Deer Hunter and sold in Italy as Deer Hunter 2 (using the same Fulci marketing tactic of sticking a number 2 onto a popular movie like Dawn Of The Dead, aka Zombi 1). 

           Warbeck and Tony King as usually a welcome presence, but they just phone it in and the whole "sarcastic hero fighting in the jungles of Nam" premise is more entertaining when there are some cannibals to battle. There is no cannibalism however, just straight laced Namsploitation fare. All the star power in exploitation horror can't save this sinking ship (you even get Bobby Rhodes, the infamous pimp from Demons 1 & 2) and that couldn’t make this plausible. 

           So here’s the story, grizzled Captain Morris is stuck in a club house (complete with strippers,pinball and a bar). And yet some people are still unhappy as his buddy shoots another soldier and then plugs himself. He hooks up with a journalist played by Tisa Farrow (who's seen better days) and they aimlessly run around for forty minutes! Dark Sky Films is restoring this and putting out the complete uncut version, so it's a possibility that I may have missed the director's original vision (I'm betting I havent though). 

            David Warbeck has charisma as a leading man in a Robert Forster Aligator type of way, it's not his fault this movie sucks so bad! John Steiner (Tenebre, Caligula) looks like a scrawny Nazi-esque captain, hulled up in an underground cave listening to the death cries on the surface, but again nothing ever builds and The Last Hunter just stalls. 

           I'm really disappointed in my favorite screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, it's like he took tracing paper over a copy of the Deer Hunter script and spilled his Macciato and got pizza sauce stains all over the pages.  According to Wiki, Marghereti attempted to make a positive Vietnam War epic?? As far as I can tell, that makes this one a propaganda film in league with shit like John Wayne or Chuck Norris (two fucktards in my opinion)! This makes absolutely no fucking sense, especially if you've seen his superior film Cannibal Apocalypse. I'm not sure why this one is in the Deep Red catalog because it has no redeeming qualities what so ever! 

USE AS A COASTER!

Go ahead, I'll catch the bullet in my teeth!

Sweet Rammstein cameo!

Fuck this shit, I'm going to trade school to become a nurse