mlraymond Review of The Last Movie

The Last Movie (1971)

Frustrating waste of film and viewer's time could have been intriguing cult film

[1/10 · 2 November 2006]

I doubt that there are many viewers who have actually seen this film. I saw it back in the early Seventies, having already read bad reviews of it, and therefore was prepared for a poor film. What I had not expected was something that is little more than a home movie with a fairly interesting drama beginning it, only to lose its way and end up being literally nothing. SPOILERS AHEAD:We are led to believe that Kansas will be literally crucified by the villagers as a literal Christ figure, and then that plot line disappears completely. There are a couple of sequences that indicate Hopper might want viewers to see Kansas as the bad guy, rather than the hero, but these are so underdeveloped as once again, to go nowhere. The actual ending of the movie is so vague, to put it mildly, we're not even sure if Kansas is supposed to have been killed. The next to last scene shows Hopper arguing with a couple of actors, as all three pass a bottle of booze back and forth between them. The two drunken actors laugh at Hopper when he tries to get them to finish the movie. Then follows the anticlimactic "ending", in which Kansas is seen staggering down a road and falls, presumably dead, presumably having been shot by some unseen assassin. Then the words " the end" appear, looking like they've been written on the film with a felt tip pen. And that's it. How Hopper persuaded the studio to release this thing I'll never know, but the sheer gall of a filmmaker to expect an audience to pay cash to see a movie with numerous intertitles stating " scene missing" is beyond belief. My biggest criticism is that potentially, there's an interesting story here that could have been made by competent filmmakers into a small but worthwhile film. There's the germ of a real movie lurking somewhere amongst all the wasted celluloid and ludicrous non-characters and pointless dialogue. The fact that Hopper overcame his drug and alcohol problems, and is now acclaimed as a genuine filmmaker, with some real movies to his credit, as well as some good acting in other people's movies, is something for him to be proud of, but this movie is not. A fascinating mess, worth seeing once out of sheer curiosity, but pretty dull and stupid. Only for fans of real turkeys like Ed Wood's movies.