Within Dennis Hopper's infamous post-EASY RIDER flop, THE LAST MOVIE, are several movies with great potential had they been more fleshed-out - or if at least one took center stage...

These include an American-made cowboy picture being filmed in the main location of Peru where a stuntman dies, leading Hopper's character, Kansas, an extra and stuntman, caterer and acquirer of horses, to deal with the conscious-brooding aftermath... A psychotic local, after witnessing the Western being made, filming his own makeshift movie with bamboo cameras, actual punches pulled and real gunshots fired without blanks... A melancholy priest dealing with how his small town is altered by the Ugly American production, having come and gone with all its bogus yet influential, shoot-em-up violence... A gold-seeking expedition-plan between Hooper and his scruffy (future OUT OF THE BLUE) sidekick Don Gordon... Or our moping American film-worker falling in love with a beautiful Peruvian prostitute, Maria, played by natural beauty Stella Garcia...

The latter holds the most value since it's the only subplot with actual layers... Which includes a pretty, classy, uptight yet progressive wife and daughter of a broom factory owner: the first awkwardly seduced by Hooper's Kansas in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON scream queen Julie Adams and TV actress Donna Baccala as this non-linear, documentary-style odyssey goes from the gorgeously green and/or canyon-backed Peru exterior to a grainy night on the town, as an unrefined love triangle ensues: Hopper's lady-friend, Maria, hired her workmate... future COLUMBO victim Poupée Bocar as a bisexual nightclub singer... to entertain the ragtag group. And the following daytime scene involves a seemingly important conversation about Don Gordon's supposed gold mine followed by a quick, unrealized trek to find it - lasting less than most scenes would need to begin...

What everything boils down to is Hopper's Kansas in love with a whore who's more real, capable, experienced and tough than he is. Meanwhile, the stunt man's supposedly pivotal death, mentioned in plot-summaries ranging from the back of VHS copies to the new Criterion Blu Ray, means close to nothing. In fact, we only catch one quick moment of his final plummet which, strangely enough, is shown after the movie-within-a-movie has already packed up and gone away...

Peter Fonda and other Hopper cohorts make cameos in the Western being shot by Sam Fuller while Kris Kristofferson provides a disjointed Roman Chorus of sorts, crooning his most famous ballad made famous by Janis Joplin, ME AND BOBBY MCGEE, and the likes of character-actor Severn Darden and lovely hippie chicks Toni Basil and Michelle Phillips glide in and out like in some deranged oasis, especially during nighttime parties where we possibly learn what this deliberately confusing film's really about...

Since Hopper's Kansas is merely a caterer, having to provide alcohol to the selfish and raucous cast and crew while brooding outside of both the real and fake film's perimeter, it could be this LAST MOVIE is Hopper's way of not only being a dissociated artist but playing one in his own disassociated motion picture...

One telling moment and perhaps the best scene overall has Kansas demonstrating to the insanely-inspired Peruvian "director" how a beaten-up actor should throw a punch instead of continuing to bloody each other up. After which this director/dictator informs Kansas that his picture isn't fake like the Western that Kansas worked on...

Perhaps the askew logic is: Since those bamboo camera's aren't actually filming anything, real life isn't being captured like the kind of trickery... or "game" as the priest calls it... that inspired this local violent mockery. In other words, anything being recorded for posterity is futile and worthless compared to the real thing: just as Maria is more of a real person than Kansas. The problem is that both the actual-fake and fake-fake movies are all being filmed, and have to seem real to the audience. So Hopper's attempt to make a distinction between the two are somewhat futile in the end...

Either way, the misplaced yet strangely intriguing bedlam leads to a rushed third act that ultimately implodes upon itself... Especially in one scene as Hopper sits with the two leading Peruvian/Spanish characters... the priest and the loco-local director... and says, with finality, "To Hell with it!"

Which would occur a few years later when Hopper's frantic hippie photographer in Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW says the world will end with a whimper, not a bang, followed by "I'm splitting, Jack" before vanishing from the scene, and movie, altogether. But it's one thing for a character to take off, and something else entirely when it's the film's own director...

If he had had more fun and action within the chaos instead of so much art-house distraction, we, the viewer, could have shared in that pandemonium as if it were ours as well as the director's. Experiencing a voyeuristic catastrophe that only a genius could make is more of an addictive and bizarre, awkwardly intriguing journey than an insightful or overall effective one. Thankfully, the timeless, legendary and groundbreaking road classic EASY RIDER had an actual destination, which was, within the story, tragically unfulfilled. So maybe, just maybe, THE LAST MOVIE was Hopper's next step after having nowhere left to go. (full review at cultfilmfreaks.com)

"The Last movie" appears to be rough footage strung together--possibly from several different incomplete films. The first portion just starts on the set of a Sam Fuller film and is very rough. Then, abruptly, this ends and one of the film crew (Dennis Hopper) stays behind in Peru and the rest of the film are his VERY random adventures. Some of the lovely things that occur to him or around him include: the locals making a 'movie' using fake equipment and real violence, some rich Americans showing up and acting like obnoxious capitalist swine (as they pay local women to have sex with each other as they watch),Hopper's prostitute girlfriend demanding a refrigerator (and many other things) even though they have no electricity, Hopper beating up this prostitute for no apparent reason, Hopper's friend (Don Gordon) talking on and on and on about his gold mine and several other irrelevant plot elements--none of which make up a coherent whole.

The only reason I saw this film is that I have a crazy quest to see all of the films from the Harry Medved book "The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time" and this is one of the last five I have yet to see. In some cases, the films in the book were laughably bad--such as "Robot Monster" or "Santa Claus Versus the, Martians". And others, such as this film, are just plain bad--and not in a fun or enjoyable way. And yet, like some of these truly terrible films, some people find great significance and meaning in the film. I read through the reviews for "The Last Movie" and it sounded like a Fellini or Truffaut film--full of brilliance and insight. All I saw was a lot of very rough and poorly filmed footage strung together rather incoherently because the people making the film were reported very stoned throughout the production--which is very, very easy to believe. Instead of a film, this is more like bits and pieces of many films thrown together rather randomly--and in the process, some actors embarrassed themselves--such as Gordon and Julia Adams (of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" fame).

The film is an incoherent mess--randomly edited, with long and pointless musical interludes that were intended as deep and meaningful, completely amateur acting throughout and no discernible script. A few of the many plot elements COULD have been the basis for a good movie--such as the idea of Hollywood or American consumerism destroying a native culture. Too bad 2/3 of the budget was apparently spent on drugs instead of writers, directors and actors.

This may not be the very worst film I have ever seen, but it's sure in the running. I would say it was the film that wasted its budget more than any other and I would also say it was the most incoherent film I have seen--and with over 10000 reviews to my credit, that's saying a lot.

It's a shame, as Hopper's previous directorial project was "Easy Rider"--a film with amazing depth and insight. So, it's obvious that he could have done better and did do better when he was using less drugs.

When I was really young, I loved to visit the high school library that my uncle ran. Today, it would probably seem small, but in my ten-year-old mind, it was huge. That said -- now that I'm a grown-up, I realize just how many cool books my uncle would hide in his library for kids to find. There were collections of EC Comics and stuff like The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way) by Harry Medved, Randy Dreyfuss and Michael Medved.

When I first read that book, back when I was twelve, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever laid my eyes upon. I got all of their Golden Turkey Awards books and loved the quasi-documentary It Came from Hollywood But as I grew older, I began to realize that many of the movies that were decried by these books -- such as the work of Ed Wood, for example -- held artistic merit that superseded anyone making light of them.

Reviewing some of The Fifty Worst Films today, I realize how many of them I actually enjoy, like Airport '75, the Matt Helm movie The Ambushers, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Godzilla vs. Hedorah and Valley of the Dolls. One of the films on this list really fascinated me, though: Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie.

After Easy Rider became a surprise success, Dennis Hopper could do anything he wanted. And sure, maybe what he wanted to do was take near inhuman levels of drugs. But let's be serious -- he had the soul of an artist and $1 million dollars from Universal bankrolling him, as well as the understanding that he had free rein with little to no intervention from the studio. After all, that had paid off with Easy Rider, right? And Hopper had been trying to get this movie made since he was in Rebel Without a Cause.

For most of 1970, Hopper and his crew shot hours upon hours of footage. And then Hopper went to New Mexico and started editing. And drinking. And doing drugs. And editing. And doing more drugs. I'm not exaggerating -- just watch Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson's (yes, the same person who wrote The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) The American Dreamer.

Hopper had a cut that was pretty conventional. In the Alex Cox documentary Scene Missing, Alejandro Jodorowsky watched this cut and mocked Hopper, telling him that he had the opportunity to create true art. The visionary director would give Hopper a cut of the film, which he didn't use, but inspired him to craft the disjointed film that exists today. Another interesting fact: when this was first screened, the projectionist loudly said, "This movie has the right title, because it's going to be the last movie Universal ever makes." An enraged Hopper attacked the man, ending the screening. Hopper's career would take a long time to recover -- which we covered way back when we discussed Chainsaw 2.

After being a lost film for decades -- it had a short two week New York run and ran in some drive-ins as Chinchero -- Arbelos, a new boutique distributor focusing on the release of both new and restored classic art house titles, has re-released a 4K restoration of The Last Movie as their first official product.

The main premise of The Last Movie is that films are dangerous. You can interpret that metamorphically or physically, as the indigenous natives of Peru keep making a movie as a ritual long after the camera have stopped rolling. Hopper based this story on things he saw as he filmed the movie that would be the first of his many comebacks, The Sons of Katie Elder, where he saw locals do the very same thing.

Kansas (Hopper) has stayed behind in Peru after a movie ends shooting after an actor is killed in a stunt. A stuntman by trade, Kansas decides to quit making movies and stay behind with a Maria, local prostitute, in what feels like paradise.

There's a subplot with a couple who wants to buy a mine that doesn't have much to do with what happens next, but the woman in the couple is Julie Adams from Creature from the Black Lagoon. It really feels like it gets in the way of what the movie should be about. It also feels like Hopper shot so much footage that he could have edited twenty different movies out of the results.

Yet the real narrative of the film is that the natives have turned sticks into cameras and are filming a movie that will never exist filled with real violence. That's when The Last Movie begins to touch on the issues of reality versus fiction and how we perceive storytelling, as well as using behind the camera terminology as a storytelling tool.

Despite its downbeat theme, there's a true beauty to this film, made even more gorgeous by the painstaking restoration process the film has gone through. The final scenes of the wooden false cameras attempting in vain to film Kansas's sacrifice are breathtaking.

"It ends in fire. All my movies end in fire." Hopper may have said that about Easy Rider, but it's true about nearly everything he touched. This comes from Some Kind of Genius, a 30-minute one on one talk with Hopper that's also on the blu ray release. It's exactly the kind of extra I was hoping for -- a rambling discussion of career and art by Hopper. I wish I'd have the opportunity to speak to the man, someone I feel was a true icon of American art, but never will get the chance to. This doc gets me close.