‘The Last Hunter’ or — Makes ‘Tropic Thunder’ Seem Like ‘Full Metal Jacket’?
I had several major reservations sitting down to watch Antonio Margheriti’s low-budget, Italian Namsploitation flick ‘The Last Hunter’ (1980) last night, the main one being that I was about to sit down and watch a low-budget, Italian Namsploitation flick. The others were obvious — Would it be crass and offensive? Would it glorify violence? Would it make the mistake of portraying Vietnam as an American tragedy? Would it celebrate rampant militarism? Would it be a moral and political nightmare?
The good news is that Margheriti’s action film is so stupid, so ridiculous and so inadvertently hilarious that I was too busy crying with laughter at the insanity on screen to be offended, let alone start asking questions about the representation of American foreign policy and/or humanity’s capacity for violence. Freed from such heavyweight and thorny issues ‘The Last Hunter’ is the able to do what most other Vietnam films can’t, and possibly shouldn’t, do and that’s be a load of bonkers fun.
The story is simple — Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck) accepts a mission to lead a small team behind enemy lines to destroy a VC radio tower broadcasting anti-American propaganda. And that’s basically it with the majority of the movie being nothing more than a string of incidents consisting of various Vietnam War tropes and clichés before culminating in inevitable destruction and a last minute plot-twist that impossible to see coming because it’s so profoundly unbelievable, idiotic and preposterous.
So there’s the patrol boat going up the river and suffering an attack from the trees, then the traps in the jungle followed by an ambush during the scouting of a local village. We then see the group encounter a stranded platoon of combat crazy, drugged-up marines along with the compulsory brigade of torture-happy Viet Cong. This means that ‘The Last Hunter’ is like watching ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979) and ‘The Deer Hunter’ (1978) rolled into one but crammed into only 96 minutes and so daft it feels like it was directed by Gerald Thomas.
Yet this daftness is part of the film’s charm and whilst it might sound bizarre to call a hyper-violent, Italian Namspolitation movie “charming” it’s less bizarre when you consider that Margheriti’s background was steeped in the escapist genres of Eurospy, Westerns and especially Italian Science Fiction. This sci-fi background also meant Margheriti was incredibly deft at filming cheap, yet convincing, model and miniature work to really bust open the scale of his low-budget projects before, typically, going on to blow everything up in surprisingly spectacular style.
A great example of this is when the team stumble across that platoon of isolated, shell-shocked marines in the jungle. They’re a nasty bunch who harass the female reporter accompanying the squad on their secret mission and who live in a cave with no available amenities except a fully functioning saloon, a pinball machine (I’d still love to know how they got the bloody thing all that way into this, supposedly, remote cave system) and a shit tonne of high explosives. “What awful people!” I found myself thinking which is why I didn’t mind in the slightest when the VC suddenly popped-up, massacred them all and promptly blew the entire place to smithereens. It’s absolutely hilarious and the apparent glee Margheriti takes in emphasising the punctuation, impact and rhythm of some seriously impressive explosions just makes the entire thing even more berserk.
‘The Last Hunter’ is not, in any way shape or form, a film for those who demand depth, realism or a message in their war films as it feels more like the product of Ben Stiller’s Tugg Speedman and Robert Downey Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus than anything Coppola or Cimino would ever put to film. But if you’re a fan of low-budget Italian exploitation movies, and especially the work of Antonio Margheriti, then there’s a lot here to enjoy. I had no idea Vietnam could be so incredibly silly.
