cult film freak: LEE MAJORS & CHRIS MAKEPEACE TAKING ON 'THE LAST CHASE'

Title: The Last Chase Year: 1981 Rating: ***1/2

Well here’s a movie description you won't see today: "In the near future, evil fascists have forced everyone to recycle and drive electric cars...” Made during the tail end of the oil crisis in the early eighties, this low budget science-fiction wears its agenda on the main character’s sleeve...

Lee Majors is an ex race car driver who, living in a world where disease (with people wearing masks and take vaccines, sound familiar?) has taken many of the inhabits, and it's all been blamed on oil and automobiles... so he makes a statement by (after decades of being paid to warn students about automobiles) driving a 917-10 Porsche race-car past the outskirts of town, and he’s not alone: MY BODYGUARD actor Chris Makepeace, as the only student not “brainwashed” by the rascally environmentalists, joins Lee while Burgess Meredith, a seventy-year-old Vietnam Veteran (about the age they are now), is sent in a jet fighter to dispose of our revving heroes.

There’s not much of what the title promises, just the Porsche cruising idyll through mountain roads and at one point taking a break at a rural location for Majors to have a quick fling. All the while Meredith keeps on their tail, but even he’s kept in check by the main villain, watching on a big screen from a domed building, ready to wield a mountaintop laser-beam if the old veteran, who has a heart of gold, fails his mission... Here’s when, during THE LAST ten minutes, not only the most suspenseful moments occur, but there’s an actual CHASE! Overall a pretty bad sci-fi flick if you want non-stop action and/or if you prefer a movie to live up to its title, but there are moments of pleasantly cheesy, time-filling fun. And the final line, muttered by the dictator, sums everything up: “This could set us back to the 1980s.” Which at this point in the game isn't so bad at all!