Course à mort : l'ultime solution

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!

Not as weird as it sounds but twice as unbelievable. Though this isn't a great movie it's a nice time killer for nostalgists. Lee Majors gets sick of the government who wishes to restrain everyone's need for speed. So he and a teen skip town and go cross country as a team that's like the Dukes of Hazard meets Batman and Robin (not the lame film, just the hero team). Things get nutty when Burgess Meredith is called in to take them down but he decides he won't and just pretend to. It's fun but all in all a cheese flick. Last words of the film: "this could set us back to the 1980's." That's is kinda scary when you think about it but John Hughes films would improve.

In a fuel-starved future, the totalitarian government has just impounded all private vehicles. Twenty years ago, the world was ravaged by a mysterious disease. Race car driver Franklyn Hart (Lee Majors) lost his family during the epidemic. Hart is now the spokesman for the mass transit system. He is being investigated for breaking into the impound lot and in danger of re-education. Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a hacker anti-authority boarding school student. Ring goes on the run from the police and gets Hart's help to drive to "Free California". The government has to stop this symbol of personal freedom. They bring out Vietnam vet Captain Williams (Burgess Meredith) and an F-86 Sabre jet.

This is a rally for driving freedom in response to the speed limit. There are a couple cool things in this movie. However at its heart, it's a non-sensical cheesy Canadian production. I like the operations room although I wonder if it's recycled from another movie. The world in the movie makes little sense but the idea of the freedom of the road is very appealing. Burgess talking to his plane is kind of funny. The movie probably needs more comedy and not the unintended kind.

I started watching this movie on svod because of the title and Lee Majors. I was on the verge of giving up when there was this scene with quarantine and epidemic. No more cars. Well it was dystopian in '81. No more in 2020. So not the best movie ever, but worth a try.

...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.