The Italian exploitation industry is one of the joys of my life because just when it feels like you’re running out of films from one genre, you find another one to fall in love with, often with many of the same directors, writers and actors. Can’t find any new poliziotteschi you love? Get back into giallo. Nothing in peplum for you? Dive into post-apocalyptic or Westerns or commedia sexy all’italiana.

Or how about a war movie, much less one influenced by what’s been happening in Hollywood, like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now?

Antonio Margheriti (AKA Anthony Dawson) started his directing career making science fiction films like Space-Men and Battle of the Worlds before moving on to what was hot next. Peplum, with The Golden Arrow, The Fall of Rome and Giants of Rome made over the next three years. If there’s a genre, Margheriti worked in it, like horror (Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death, The Virgin of Nuremberg, The Unnaturals), Eurospy (Bob Fleming… Mission Casablanca, Operazione Goldman), Western (Take a Hard Ride, And God Said to Cain), more science fiction (Wild, Wild Planet; War of the Planets, Alien from the Abyss), giallo (The Young, the Evil and the Savage; Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye), comic books (Mr. Superinvisible, Yor Hunter from the Future), cannibals (Cannibal Apocalypse) and even Raiders of the Lost Ark remake remix ripoffs (Hunters of the Golden Cobra, The Ark of the Sun God).

If you could shoot it, Margheriti did it. He was quick, he was cheap and often, he’s pretty incredible. Not always, but more often than not.

And this is one of his war pictures.

Saigon isn’t a fun time to be alive for an American soldier. Captain Henry Morris (David Warbeck) is introduced in this film when he watches his friend shoot another soldier in a brother and then turn the gun on himself. After that, Captain Henry is given a mission. Fly into Cambodia and shut down a radicalized radio station broadcasting Viet Cong messages. He’ll have nearly no help other than a few soldiers. And after years at war, does he even care anymore?

The soldiers under his command include Sgt. George Washington (Tony King) and Carlos (Bobby Rhodes). They barely make it into the jungle when traps shred one of the men nearly in half and later, water snakes emerge and make a meal of another. Italian wartime isn’t pretty. That’s why this movie is on Section 3 of the video nasties list.

As the men make their way through the jungles of the Philippines, they’re joined by a photojournalist named Jane Foster, played by Tisa Farrow. Remember what I said earlier about finding people across genre? Ms. Farrow showed up in just a few Italian movies, but all are memorable and each is in its own genre: slasher (Antropophagus), zombies (Zombi), this war film and one that crosses into both giallo and the poliziotteschi (Strange Shadows In an Empty Room).

There are also some crazy moments along the way, including Major William Cash (John Steiner) having a secret cave base that has a full bar staffed by Luciano Pigozzi, as well as an array of porn mags and working pinball machines. Cash’s favorite music is the sound of gunfire and he barely stops his men from assaulting Foster when she tries to get a beer. His quick thinking is to send one of them across enemy lines to steal a coconut from a tree while being shot at.

There’s a reason for scenes like that. According to the documentary Margheriti and The Last Hunter, the man known in America as Anthony Dawson didn’t want to make a political film for or against the Vietnam War. He just wanted to make a movie that was 100% behind one thing: being entertaining.

In Italy, this was released as Cacciatore 2, as The Deer Hunter was called Il Cacciatore. The only thing this movie has in common with its inspiration is Vietnam and it’s more of a ripoff of Apocalypse Now as it was shot in the exact same locations and dealt with the same issues that Coppola dealt with except with a much, much smaller budget.

Throughout the movie, Morris keeps thinking back to New York City and that girl back home, who is played by Margie Newton (Aphrodite from The Adventures of Hercules, the painted-up Lia Rousseau from Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead). As they get closer to that anti-American radio tower and the voice of the Tokyo Rose-style woman telling the U.S. soldiers just to lie down their arms as we hear easy listening tunes and Viet Cong kill the drugged out and hazed American boys, we come to realize that this love waiting at home and the one Morris has to kill are one and the same, which is an astounding coincidence but says a lot about the end of U.S. innocence in the 1970s.

Over the score by Franco Micalizzi, whose song “The Puzzle” will be familiar to fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we get a great ending, as Morris gets Foster on the last helicopter out of Hell and just kneels as the napalm starts to rain down, a visual similar to Platoon six years before that movie would be made.