The Last Chase

Plot synopsis:
Movie opens with roar of race car engine, clunking out on the back stretch of deserted race oval. Stands are empty. Cut to the driver as he goes to the gas pumps and finds them padlocked. Next cut to him looking for someone - shouts back to guy sweeping up about the gas. The janitor says says something like "I can get you anything, but I can't get you gas. And I'm sorry about your family Mr. Hart; I'd have sent flowers, buy you can't even get them anymore.From this introductory exchange, the movie informs us through the narration of Lee Majors that we are in a post-apocolypic future in which a gasoline shortage and a plague outbreak have decimated the country. Cars are now illegal, and society has settled into a state of "utopian" existence where people drive get around by mass transit and the police drive electric golf carts and people have been consolidated into the major urban areas of the East Coast. We learn also that Mr. Hart lost his wife and son in the plaugue. During this narration the film shows him trailering his race car back to his home. It shows him driving his station wagon through a throng of people at an aid camp and being ordered out of it by a soldier. As he is riding the train back from working at the camp, time fast forwards about 10 years and Mr. Hart exits the train in a business suit, looking somewhat older and greyer, into the "utopian" future city of Philadelphia.He is now a lecturer at something that resembles the Department of Transportation, and his job is to talk about mass transit to high school students as someone who used to race cars.Meanwhile, on the campus of an unnamed prep school, there is a montage of scenes involving a nerdy kid who doesn't fit in. The other boys rip up his science notes. He blows up their baseball. They hang him upside down from the quad statue. He blows the head off the statue. Then we see him using an old school computer and modem to jam the government's computers.At home, while Frank Hart is watching home movies on the envisioned successor to the VCR, a broadcast from Radio Free California appears on his TV. They say they have returned to their city, their roads, and their cars.Things for Frank take a turn for the worse at work. He is called in for an interview with an agent from the "adjustment bureau", who shows confronts him about breaking in to a junk yard. They have an little raprte in which he keeps using "old" words, like junkyards and jail, and she corrects him with the new words, like "vehicle graveyard" and "rehabilitation center". In the final exchange he tells her there are too many "rules", to which she says they are "laws", and he replies, "Lady, you got too damn many laws."From this point on, the plot follows an arc in which Frank Hart flees Philadelphia in his old race car, bringing along the boy from the prep school, and travelling the back roads of an abandoned American heartland. The folks at the adjustment bureau, including a guy from Washington brought in specially to deal with the "car crisis", make a number of attempts to stop Mr. Hart, principal among them is hiring a former air force ace and retrofitting his old Korean War era sabre jet so he can hunt down Frank Hart. This ace has become a bit of a wine-o, and seems to be longing for the good old days himself. He initially strafes the car, as it pulls off the road, and Hart is wounded. He manages to get into the treeline, where a group of survivalists find him and the boy, and take them in. However a SWAT team is sent in to raid the camp and find the car, and the two must leave. Eventually the pilot and the race car driver face off mano a mano with their machines, and, not so surprisingly, it turns out that they are on the same side.Meanwhile, Hawkins, the "Washington" administrator and the bureau, has instructed Mr. Morley, the tech guy, to activate a "Star Wars" laser on the west coast and put it on automatic so that it will shoot anything that moves. The laser, however, is mechanically damaged with age, and will not shoot above a certain elevation. The laser cannot shoot down the plane. Captain Williams attempts to report the laser to Hart, but their radios are jammed by the bureau. Realizing that Hart will be targeted by the laser, Williams zooms ahead and destroys the laser with a kamikaze dive. Before going down, he radios in to Mr. Morley that he "Sees chance to wear medals again."With the laser destroyed, the car arrives in California and the closing scene shows people turning out in the streets and crowding around as they drive into San Francisco. An announcement of the cars arrival is narrated by the voice of Radio Free California.In the final scene, back at the adjustment bureau in Phili, Mr. Hawkins packs up his things, and before leaving gives a brief eulogy for their utopian world that this "will set us back to the 1980s".

Tags: cult, flashback

Review:
I first saw this movie,shortly after it came out--1981,and since then I have had the chance to see it at least three more times,(Wish I had the foresight to record it !)I really like the character that Burgess Meridith plays,he certainly know how to throw in a "Twist" or two.
OK, I'll be the first to admit that this film is nothing special in the grand scheme of millions of movies ever made.
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.
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.
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.
Race car driver Franklyn Hart (Lee Majors) lost his family during the epidemic.
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.
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.
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.
Nevertheless, this film scored a base-hit with me and earned the "somewhat watchable" rating of 5.If you have ever wanted to see Lee Majors siphoning regular gas from tanks abandoned 40 years ago and using it in a Formula I Car while chased by Burgess Meredith in a Sabre Jet, this is the film for you.
Majors plays a professional race car driver forced to give up his career and dismantle his car by a US government which has outlawed petroleum use.
Lee Majors' character decides to leave for, of all places, California, where people have not realized that petroleum use is a desire, not a right, and are carrying on the same sort of destructive culture the rest of the USA has apparently disavowed.
And if you start to wonder how Mr. Majors kept such a straight face throughout this film, just think back on his run in The Six Million Dollar Man. And when you get bored with the Roger Corman-like 2 minute pans across screen following the ancient Burgess Meredith and his Sabre Jet, just imagine him cackling like the Penguin, or focus on the other bizarre animal noises he keeps uttering in his aerially induced euphoria.This film is remarkably good for what it is.
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).
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..
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.
Here I was hoping to see a tremendously cool car chase motion picture, in the same style as "Vanishing Point" only in a futuristic and thus even more desolate setting.
In other words, a virulent and adrenalin-rushing road adventure in which one awesome hero gets chased by an increasingly larger army of dim-witted cops that continuously crash their cars or drive into ravines.
The year is  um, I forgot already, but it's the not too distant future and the new fascist government prohibited all forms of private transportation due to the scarcity of oil products.
During a moment of clarity, however, he fixes his hideous old car (I think it's a Porsche) and heads out to California along with a rebellious teenager.
Let me assure you, it's a truly ludicrous sight to see a Sci-Fi movie using scenery from the Korean War. This could have been a great action/adventure flick, but instead became a boring and talkative drama with too much pretension.
Lee Majors clearly craves back to the successful days of "Six Million Dollar Man" and Burgess Meredith, although vivid and outrageous, looks just as antique as the plane he's flying..
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..
Watch it now before we run out of oils and you'll be too busy surviving and you won't have time to eat popcorns and watch movie.
Also, be warned that the 6 Million Dollar Man and the kid that needed a Bodyguard and that old gruffy man are in this.
Stupid, mindless drivel about a jet assembled within hours by mechanics who have never worked on airplanes (piloted by Burgess Meredith) chasing a Porsche race car which runs on decades-old gasoline sludge, driven by Lee Majors, with Chris Makepeace as the runaway techno-wiz who can McGyver spare parts into a radio receiver which can pick up all frequencies simultaneously, and who somehow learned how to acquire and use chemicals to make high explosives in a perfectly peaceful society.
Terrible waste of Burgess Meredith, but Chris Makepeace may at least be forgiven on the grounds that this was only his second film..
I remember seeing this film at the theater with Robin Williams' Popeye" as afternoon double feature movie matinée when I was kid.
This was low budget Canadian film marketed as American film (Lee Majors made a couple of Canadian movies like this in early 80's such as Agency with late Robert Mitchum) The shortage of oils leading into ban of automobiles, epidemic wiped out the populations, and people are forced by government to live in suppressed society with ridiculous rules and restrictions.
The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors, plays former race car driver who rebuilds his Porsche that was hidden underneath of his garage and breaks free to California where people are start living in free society like used to be.
Former World War jet fighter played by late Burgess Meredith is after him to kill.
It just failed to develop those interesting issues/setups/surprisingly great characters into some what successful movie.
However that didn't stop this movie to become fun/enjoyable vintage guilty pleasure low budget sci-fi action flick.
Movie stardom hungry Lee Majors with mullet, wearing silver racing jacket (I think stunt man, Mike, from recent Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof might be got the idea from Lee's character, Frank Hart.
The cross country chase between Porsche and jet was all old school stunts, and it also captured beautiful Denver/Rocky Mt. No CGI on this!!!
This movie also features Chris Makepeace from My Bodyguard and Vamp.
I really like to see this movie available on DVD sometime soon!!!.
After watching this on the MST3K episode, I have to wonder how many movies this film borrows from.
like the fact that, even though gas is unavailable, there is plenty of it in abandoned gas stations, and the stations are located close enough together to keep an F1 race car going all the way across the country..
While I like Lee Majors, Chris Makepeace (watch My Bodyguard (1980)if you would like to see a GOOD movie that he was in...
of Meatballs (also starring Bill Murray) for some laughs), and Burgess Meredith, this role does/did nothing for their careers.Anyway, Lee Majors character, Franklyn Hart, is an ex- race car driver who plans on driving his race car (which he had in storage) across the country to California.
Three "stars", Lee Majors, Chris Makepeace and Burgess Meredith, struggle through the worst batch of cinematography ever, delivering lines which must have been written by a secret Dick Cheney-style workgroup composed of Exxon and GM lawyers trying to cut funding for mass transit and energy efficiency research.
Clearly what's needed in Hollywood is some sort of 401K which prevents the need for actors to take on bad movies like this in order to pay for their health care.
I wasn't even alive then, but as a child who spent more than a few sick days with a TV, a VCR, no cable, and a couple Uhf bootleg movies, one of them "The Last Chase", I understood that even though "extremism in the defence of virtue" may not be a vice, I could tell you at age 8 that it was a bad policy to follow.
The emotional baggage of causing a fatal crash, or losing your loved ones to premature disease.Today all those things would be played out with color filters and weeping string accompaniments-over-dialuage that are the hallmark of post LORT "adventure" films.
Protagonists like square jawed Lee Majors looked you squarely through the camera lense and gritted out lines like "I've done a lot of losing in my life; I don't want to lose you too." All actor.
Got to play to the youth market if you want box-office $$$.All I can say it, the conflicts in this movie make it well overdue for a remake, but thankfully the wrong people haven't made one.
if the film sounds interesting to you, nothing for it but to start looking through those crates of VHS bootlegs at the next yard sale you drive by...
Majors and outsider Makepeace disobey the rules and take a racing porche on a journey cross country.
Still this movie is worth two and a half stars, at least for Burgesses Meredith's performance as the old army pilot..
A solid and provocative futuristic sci-fi/action car chase thriller.
Following a lethal plague which has wiped out millions of people and a severe oil crisis that has caused driving to be outlawed, an authoritarian government has come into power and set up restrictive, rigidly enforced codes of proper conduct that have made individual freedom a thing of the past.
Stubbornly rebellious former race car driver Frank Hart (an appropriately stalwart and rock-like Lee Majors), frustrated with the fascist society he can't comfortably acquit himself to the stifling dictates of, decides to drive his red Porsche to the still liberated California, taking equally recalcitrant electronics whiz kid Ring McCarthy (winningly played by Chris Makepeace) along with him on a perilous trek across America's desolate abandoned highways.
Shrewd regime toady Hawkins (finely essayed to smug'n'smarmy perfection by George Touliatos) assigns batty old ace Air Force pilot J.G. Williams (a delightfully spunky Burgess Meredith, howling like a crazed bloodhound and clearly having a grand old time mugging it up) to track Hart down and kill him.An on-target celebration of rugged individualism and a frightfully prescient pre-90's prediction of mass bureaucratic conformity taken to a hideously repressive extreme, "The Last Chase" really cuts it as a rip-roaringly exciting and effective futuristic sci-fi/car chase action thriller movie ode to "stand up to the Man and to hell with the System" status quo defying rebellion and independence.
Terrific film for those who fear government interventionism in daily life.
Have seen this movie and think it's terrific!
It gives us a taste of the sort of top-down, "obey the rules or else", brainwashing type of society we could find ourselves in if we're not careful.Having been 'convinced' over the years to submit to authority and preach the 'goodness' of the new oligarchical system compared to the 'badness' of the old individualistic system, Lee Majors' character, an ex-race car driver, find encouragement in a few short pirate television transmissions.
A single Vietnam War aircraft and its pilot (Burgess Merideth) are pulled out of mothballs and a bottle, respectively, for this task.Other means are also employed along the way to try and stop the car and its occupants, including a Stalin/Mao-esquire slaughter of a group of innocent people who took them in to give them medical care.Now in 2005, since California is literally going broke spearheading the Union away from individual rights and toward Socialism, the idea of "Radio Free California" returning to machines and to personal liberty takes quite a leap of faith, but it's a fun 3000 mile trip across the country nonetheless.As the story goes, the Social dystopia was able to take hold after a disease wipes out much of the population.
But yes, in the case of Lee Majors' character and the race car, it was a gasoline engine that was the appropriate, if not the only tool capable of escaping tyranny.If this movie is one big ad for big oil companies, does that mean every movie about police who use firearms to help arrest evil-doers, or which shows someone defending their own life with a firearm, is just a big ad for Colt or Glock?
But if you're into that whole "ride public transit or go to jail" thing, you'll only like the first 15 minutes of this movie...so have your Michael Moore tapes ready..
Not if you are a race car driver.Lee Majors is a race car driver in a future where mass transit no longer exists and must now travel around and preach the 'evils' of the automobile.
Once he comes across a young anarchist played by Chris Makepeace he begins to realize that things don't have to be this way and literally digs out his Porsche to drive it across the country as a symbol of the ridiculous nature of the existing law.Not too implausible considering all the pandemic threats of today and the ever increasing speed of today's mass transit.
Juvenile car flick about burning oil = old men reliving their hormonally challenged teenage years.
By burning up gas and equating a fast, reckless car (or plane) with freedom.The plot borrows heavily from Mister Rogers' neighborhood (if it were run my an oil conglomerate) and Logan's Run (if it were heavily sedated and lacked a clear sense of style).Starring Lee Majors and Burgess Meredith this film is set in a post-gas-crisis world in which an all-powerful government doesn't want you to (*ahem*) drive your car and burn gas.
Sort of the opposite of today's Enron-and-Bush, oil-grabbing, SUV-pushing government.This juxtaposition alone makes the film laughable.
all fall flatter than a paper doll under a briefcase.Continuity is lacking-- the jet flown by Burgess Meredith's character changes colors and configuration from moment to moment as the filmmakers insult our intelligence with unmatched stock footage again and again.The plot is as moronic and only half as exciting as a Dukes of Hazzard episode.Even die-hard car-film and SF fans should avoid this film like month-old roadkill, unless you enjoy heckling Exxon executives trying to make a movie as empty as the hero's gas tank..
To set this up, you have to get into a whole Battlefield Earth thing of ancient jets and racecars running on magic fuel that can sit around for decades in abandoned fuel storage tanks that the pilot and driver can find across the entire US but which somehow escaped detection throughout all the bad years of chaos when They turned the oil off.Then you get into the Final Sacrifice zone, where the non-hardware stuff in the movie just kind of happens because it's got to or the movie couldn't lurch forward, eh?
And an ancient golden city doesn't rise up out of an Alberta wheatfield, so I guess it isn't as bad as it COULD be.****SPOILER****Of course, the Sabre Jet and the Porsche never actually do anything more than roll/drive towards each other, once.
Nor does Chris Makepeace put on a Merry Widow and purple eyeshadow and do the Time Warp with Lee Majors, either.
Canadians, being a judicious and parsimonious race, will suffer not the slightest risk of losing a perfectly good television to burning-in, so create movies like this to keep the screen phosphors occupied and happy!