The Last Hunter

The Last Hunter

Italy - 1980

Director – Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony M. Dawson)

Vestron Video, 1985, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 37 min.

Sometime near the end of the American Vietnam War, in a Saigon strip club a bunch of burnout ‘Nam rats lounge about while local girls wearing next to nothing gyrate lazily. David Warbeck, crustiest of those present, swings in his hammock, smoking and staring into space. When a drunk tries to intimidate him into a confrontation, Warbecks ethereal bitterness and detatchment prove unable to target, and the drunk moves on to the other stereotype, Steve. High strung and high as a kite Steve is more than willing to fulfill the batshit crazy role, and blasts the drunk guy in the face with a pistol before giving himself the same treatment.


During the credits, Warbeck boards a Huey and heads to a hot drop zone where he leaps solo from the chopper armed only with a rifle and a rucksack.Landing in a river he is soon picked up by a small liason team of boonie-rats including Tisa Farrow (fresh from Zombi 2), as a foreign correspondent. Trekking toward Warbecks first rendezvous point the tiny team stumbles repeatedly into multiple ‘Nam movie cliché’s from booby traps to the ubiquitous child-with-grenade trick in a village which the team subsequently reduces to splinters with small arms fire along with said inhabitants. Later that night, much to Warbeck’s disintrest Tisa squeezes out some back-story. He on the other hand can merely fever-dream flashback his motivations –both military and moral (i.e. the plot we've been waiting for) - in a cold sweat, ensuring that the bleeding-heart mothering Tisa will “ironically” fall for the distant wounded warrior.


Arriving at their destination the team discovers another bitter recalcitrant commander and a bunch of stoned demoralized and disheveled loony-tunes GI’s. Warbeck justifies their near-raping of Tisa with the old it’s OK, the war made ‘em do it, it’s not their fault excuse. Just then, the cave is infiltrated by VC and Warbeck easily flips the off the cuff mass-killing switch back on again. He and his surviving team members escape and leap onto a passing boat loaded with other stoned GI’s and shoot them all. Only Warbeck escapes unwounded and returns to the jungle where he is captured and complains bitterly when he ends up being the recipient of strangely familiar mistreatment.

Since director Margheriti made Cannibal Apocalypse the same year, it’s a bit disappointing that Last Hunter is merely typical Italian knockoff trash. Warbeck and Farrow give it some credibility but the plot itself is a lifted and degraded mix of The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. The addition of some effective gore and the subtraction of some logical continuity and all moral message from its influences merely reinforces its base, reactionary, um… ‘Namsploitation.

Miami Horror

Miami Horror

A.K.A. Miami Golem
Italy - 1985
Director – Alberto De Martino (as Martin Herbert)
Panther Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Sweet title design and even sweeter intro song (I wish I could shareit with you), but one thing that’s sad about old VHS tapes is that most of them are fullscreen and pan-n-scan and you miss some of the picture. So it is with this film, though that may prove to be some help in this case.

David Warbeck (of Fulci’s The Beyond) stars here as an intrepid and skeptical freelance TV journalist, the sleeves of his elasticky leather jacket perpetually pushed up, and always ready to scoff with impatient cockiness.

Commissioned to do a story on a scientist who has cloned a genetically modified outer-space organism which looks like a human zygote, he shows up at a science lab where his decrepit video equipment shorts out and electrocutes the creature. It simultaneously unleashes strange screaming apparitions and a string of silly shit for Warbeck to sarcastically roll his eyes at.

First, the scientist actually answers to a telekenetic but otherwise plain old boring economist who plans to use the power of the also-telekinetic and rapidly growing organism to enforce his diabolical business plan on an unsuspecting world.

In order to translate the voices on his videotape of the corny low budget apparitions, Warbeck hires the hideously nappy Laura Trotter (of Umberto Lenzi's amazing City of the Walking Dead) who opened the movie with this eye assaulting jogging outfit.

Trotter concedes that the voices are those of her fellow benevolent extra-dimensional aliens visiting earth to dispose of the malevolent psychic-fetus. On top of that her own personal agenda is sex with Warbeck, which she promptly demands. Almost as if fleeing the scene of his most embarrassing cinematic crime, Warbeck confirms her claim by staring with bored incredulity at a crude UFO landing site and later, by watching the only cool special effect of the film, a decaying housecat, twice, thanks to an editing screwup on the tape.

Returning to Trotter’s house after being continually pummeled with ridiculous crap, a distraught and emotionally damaged Warbeck quickly imbibes several fingers of scotch. Taking advantage of his fragile emotional condition Trotter extinguishes the last of his resistance with liquor and reiterates her previous demand. Yes! Warbeck, that filthy fucker, worships at the hideous mulleted alien poontang shrine and all his previous sarcastic scorn evaporates into the genuine curiosity and enthusiasm of a housebitch on a leash.

In the final anticlimactic battle with the growling psychic fetus, Warbeck mirrors the plot at large, stumbling around haphazardly smashing into shelves of breakables with his arms thrown up helplessly. Slave to the stupidity, a victorious but world weary Warbeck lugs the fetus to Trotters mothership and trades it in along with his pride in the vain hope of a merciful end to this movie

See what's in the jar on the table?

P.O.W. The Escape

P.O.W. The Escape
a.k.a. Attack Force Nam, Behind Enemy Lines
United States - 1986
Director – Gideon Amir
Video Treasures, Inc., 1989, VHS

As the negotiations are going on in Paris in 1973, Col. Jim Cooper (David Carradine) stomps into his commanding officers office in a rage demanding to know why their rescue mission plans have been changed. Damnit, if Chuck Norris can make four, count ‘em, four POW rescue movies, goddamnit, Carradine wants one too.

Without hesitation, Cooper hops on a chopper with a bunch of green privates and air assaults the purported POW camp, unloading a chopperful of shoot from the hip naivete only to discover that, duh, the camp is abandoned. Or is it! To a rockin’ 80’s soundtrack the North Vietnamese Army start mortaring the camp and the Americans pull back, but true to his motto of “Everyone goes home,” Cooper goes back into the fray for wounded boot, Teague. Narrowly escaping, they are about to get on the chopper when it is rocketed and they are forced to flee on foot into the jungle where Teague soon dies and Cooper is captured.

Taken to an inhabited camp, Cooper meets the rest of the prisoners who include Steve James (American Ninja & several Norris flicks), and the commander of the camp, Maj. Vinh (Mako of Norris’s An Eye for an Eye). Instructed to send Cooper to Hanoi as a bargaining chip, Vinh decides to cut his own deal.

If Cooper helps Vinh get to American lines (with a big sack of gold and cash he’s stolen from prisoners) the two of them can avoid Hanoi altogether and go free. Without the inclusion of the other prisoners, Cooper refuses. After kicking the ass of Sparks, a recalcitrant POW who disagrees with his plan, Cooper stonyfaces Vinh into caving, and they all roll out of camp with the POW’s hidden in a water truck.

Inevitably, the truck is shot up and the guys pile out into some hand-to-hand combat/yelling etc, in which Vinh disappears. Having discovered the sack of loot, Cooper stashes it and Sparks takes off in a jeep thinking he has it. Vinh returns and gives chase in another jeep. Cooper and the remaining guys follow in wooden canoes until they meet up with some other GI’s searching for help for their besieged base on Radar Hill.

With little time left to one up Norris’s Col. Braddock, Col. Cooper goes to the rescue once again, this time all alone until the other guys gung ho into the fray with hoots, hollers a dirtbike and a hole in the chest. Oozing big dumb water buffalo heroics, and frankly, flat out stupidity, all while draped in an American flag, Cooper smashes through the walls of subtlety to reach the inner sanctum of excess.‘Namsploitation is arguably a fun little niche from the video era, but this movie manages to use the entertaining staples of the genre to make 90 minutes feel like 190. I lost count of false endings and secondary and even tertiary characters. The one redeeming characteristic is that despite it’s plentiful use of war violence it refrains from the overt sadism of the Norris MIA series, and if one doesn’t nitpick the inaccuracies and machismo, it’s still pretty ridiculous fun.

Covers for title Attack Force Nam: