The Last Chase

This was a staple of 1980s Canadian television, not because it's particularly good (though I like it), but because it was made with Canadian dollars. Thus allowing it to fit in with the country's strange (to non-Canadians anyway) Canadian Content broadcast regulations.

Lee Majors takes time out inbetween his Six Million Dollar Man/Fall Guy gigs and races around the countryside near my neck of the woods, while Chris Makepeace blows the head off a statue real good and Burgess Meredith talks to his kite. All this, plus a decent supporting role from Harvey Atkin as the orgy-frequenting conformist co-worker who frowns upon Lee's free-thinking spirit. What's not to like?

Adding to the enjoyment is playing the game of "spot the location" and comparing places I've been to to how they're shown in the movie. The sight of dozens of extras bicycling around the Yorkdale shopping centre on their way towards a big clean Utopian bubble city (or a matte painting of it, anyway) always raises a smile.

Avoid the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this, it's really not funny, although the last line "aw, no wonder it sucks, it's Canadian!" is a good one.

OK, I'll be the first to admit that this film is nothing special in the grand scheme of millions of movies ever made. However, did you ever see a movie that was barely OK production & acting wise but held your interest? That movie is "The Last Chase." Sometimes you don't want a movie to be technically correct with perfect continuity and a flawless believable story line. This again is "The Last Chase". Sometimes you see a movie at a certain point in your past and watching it again brings back great memories from that time in your life. The Last Chase has characters that you can identify with. Lee Majors plays Franklin Hart an ex-race car driver living in a futuristic Boston who is tired of the laws of an America without oil. Chris Makepeace (Meatballs) plays a brainy student who tags along and gives Lee someone to talk to in the film. Longing for the days when America has gasoline and he could race his car and be a recognized sports figure Frank sees an illegal television broadcast from California (A Free State) and decides that Boston is no longer the place he wants to be. Set in the United States and filmed in Canada, the Last Chase is a fun albeit silly romp that converts an interesting story to film. If it's listed, record it. This one's very tough to find in any format. Made by Crown International Pictures Canada, I'd plead for the DVD, but that request would fall on deaf ears as almost no one would ever remember this one. But I liked it. The Gil Melle score is terrific!

First of all, it has a great score by Gil Melle. He did cool synthesizer stuff with stuff like The Questor Tapes and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and he doesn't disapppoint here. Even at the dullest moments, you can count on the score to give you a jolt or two.

The main problem is that everything in this movie is just...slightly off-key. Give it a better actor than Lee Majors as the "hero," and a better old fogey/jetfighter than hammy Burgess Meredith, and do a little more than just rehash Farenheit 451 with gas instead of books, and this might have worked. Chris Makepeace is okay (although the juvie bad boy/computer hacker stereotype was already overdone by '81), and the plane vs. car action sequences aren't too badly done.

*shrug* I liked it. It wasn't better than Cats, but otherwise it works for me.

...in a vehicle with no headlights.

Here's the story. In a future time when the government won't let you own private modes of transportation, a former race car driver (Majors) who now has to give commercial lectures on just how great it is in a world with no cars, gets fed up, rebuilds his Porsche, and hits the long abandoned highways to reach "free" California.

A film nowhere near as good as its wonderfully daft premise suggests, the problem with it is that you can tell it's just playing it way too safe. I'm not saying it had to turn into Death Race 3000 or anything, but there are parts where you can tell cuts have been made (the very brief glimpse at some kind of sex club) to get it a PG rating, and, besides one poor old man getting shot in the chest during a raid, the encounters with the government are handled in a pretty silly fashion.

Still, the concept is fun as far as B films go, and when this does allow itself to just be what it wants to be (Major's barrel-chested macho rebel act in the first twenty minutes) it almost gets by.

That Porche is a pretty lousy choice for a cross-country escape too as, again, it has no headlights, no storage compartments for food that I could see, and an open cockpit so he can freeze to death in the mountains.

Seeing a movie like this gives me a feeling deep in my bowels that someday, I might become an action movie hero. This is an incredibly horrifying movie about the future that could be. I was compelled to watch this movie from front to end, hoping that somehow this movie could get cheesier, and my wishes came true. It is great to know that once an incredibly bad movie gets worse, that it comes out on top again as an entertaining vision of our fears as they were in the early-Eighties.