You’re arguably the best actor of our generation and here you are as the bad guy in a vehicle for Frankie Muniz, at the time a hot sitcom star on Malcolm In the Middle. Speaking of sitcom stars, this was written by Dan Schneider (who beyond being on Head of the Class and writing Good Burger also essayed the perfect role of the evil Ricky Smith in Better Off Dead) and Brian Robbins (who also went from Head of the Class to now being the President of Kids & Family Entertainment at ViacomCBS). If that isn’t enough big time talent for you, this was directed by Shawn Levy, who directed the Night at the Museum movies before becoming the executive producer and one of the directors of Stranger Things.
This movie is literally packed with talented people, like Donald Faison, Sandra Oh, Taran Killam, Amanda Bynes and the reason why this movie ended up on our site, Lee Majors, who plays an aging stuntman. The hardest thing he ever had to do? Watch his leading ladies kiss some other guy while he’s bandaging his knee.
So yeah. All this talent in the service of a teen comedy in which Paul Giamatti gets dyed blue. They even remade this movie in 2016 and Barry Bostwick took over that role. The blue skin is the comeuppance for stealing Muniz’s script and making it his own. I was around twenty-some years too late to be a target audience for this film, but if it works for you, so be it.
I’m just here for Lee Majors, a phrase I have uttered more than once this week.
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on December 8, 2020, as part of our “Fast and Furious Week Part II” of film reviews. We’re taking a second, tweaked look at the film as part of our tribute to Lee Majors this week.
Damn you, Burt Reynolds! Damn you, Mel Gibson! And damn you, Canadian film industry! For we blame each of you for this utterly dumb collision of Smokey and the Bandit and Mad Max*. And does anyone remember 1979’s Americathon with “Mr. President” John Ritter? And we’ll blame Burt twice because, since this is a cross-country race to a “free zone” in California where there are no vehicular rules, we have a touch of Cannonball Run. What the hell, let’s blame David Carradine, too. For if 1976’s Cannonball had a jet plane, we’d have The Last Chase.
Yes. You heard us right. This is a post-apoc flick about a car vs. a jet plane. For in a petrol-void world, the last chase will not be between a futuristic, Spaghetti Westerneque cop and punk-mohawked warlord: the end shall be waged between a Porsche driven by an ex-bionic man and a fighter jet piloted by an ex-penguin.
Remember Firebird 2015 with Darren McGavin? Well, if you thought that future was FUBAR’d. . . .
Warning: The Logan’s Run-inspired city may not appear in the actual film.
In this futuristic tale that takes place in the year 2011, Lee Majors stars as our faux “The Bandit” and Mickey from Rocky, yes, Burgess Meredith, stars as our defacto “Sheriff Buford T. Justice.” Only the Pengy is a burnt-out, ex-hot shot Air Force pilot assigned to fire up a mothballed fighter jet to chase down Major’s ex-race car driver gas scofflaw. And with cars and motor racing banned, the powers that be use Lee’s mothballed celebrity as a government shill to pitch the “new order” to the oppressed masses.
And I, desperate for entertainment in my youth, went to my town’s little duplex to see this.
Shame on me.
But not shame on Lee Majors, as his Fawcett-Majors Productions was already kaput when this went into production. So the blame for this is squarely on Crown International’s shoulders, as Lee was only an actor for hire. Yes, we speak of the same Crown International whose drive-in oeuvre fell into public domain and has served as grey-marketed home video fodder for years — but has also given us Allegheny County frolicking lads many-a-gleeful Mill Creek 12-Pack Box Sets (Savage Cinema and Explosive Cinema) to enjoy and fill out our personal film catalogs.
It was expected that The Last Chase — courtesy of its sci-fi plot in a post-Star Wars cinema world — would break Lee Majors, finally (and deserving) — unlike his first four films The Norseman, Killer Fish, Steel, and Agency— into a theatrical career. Sadly, as with most of Crown’s films, The Last Chase suffered, not so much from its Rollerballesque story about a man’s quest for individuality in an corporate-run, Gestapo-like police state, but from its ubiquitously, oh so Crown low budget. And let’s not forget that Crown’s other Star Wars bid, Galaxina, was another one of their duds.
In a Devil’s Advocate world: If Lee’s Canadian-made, post-apoc bid had Warner Bros.’ and MGM Studios’ production scope of their respective ’70s apoc-flicks The Omega Man and Soylent Green made with Charlton Heston . . . well, Lee Majors would have had a theatrical career analogous to big Chuck, there’s no doubting that fact. Could you see Lee Majors in James Caan’s role as Jonathan E. in Rollerball? With Lee’s football acumen, I sure can. Somebody, call Stallone and cast Lee in the next The Expendables flick. Or buddy cop him with Bruce Willis.
Sadly, The Last Chase was another Crown International hopeful that tanked at the box office — one that coincided with Lee having to deal with the fact that he was contractually obligated to be on location filming in Canada — while his marriage was failing. And that he had to see Farrah and her new lover, Ryan O’Neill (The Driver), paraded around the tabloids. It’s believed the culmination of the film’s failure and his wife’s affair during filming led to Lee’s decision to return to television — with The Fall Guy — and give up on feature films. For if not for this film, his marriage could have been saved.
Argh! No freebie uploads? What the hell? This is a Crown International Pictures production, after all, and their entire catalog in the public domain. Oh, well. We did find this 3:00 opening credits clip, a trailer, an alternate-extended trailer, and a segment of the first 30-minutes, with Part 2 and Part 3. The Last Chase was originally released on VHS by Vestron Video (now a division of Lions Gate Entertainment), which licensed the film to DVD in May 2011 through Code Red Releasing.
* While we’ve never reviewed Mad Max itself, we certainly reviewed all of its knockoffs with our “Atomic Dust Bin of Apocalyptic Films ” Part 1 and Part 2 round-up featurettes packed with links to all of our reviews. We also discuss the awesome, Porsche 917-Chaparral hybrid from The Last Chase in our “Ten Post-Apocalyptic Vehicles” featurette.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Editor’s Note:We planned our “Lee Majors Week” before we came up with our month-long February blowout of Mill Creek box sets . . . and it just so happened this Lee Majors ditty appeared on Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties 50-movie set (Agency). So, actually, this April review of Agency isn’t a repost: the Mill Creek review from February is the repost. Not that anyone cares.
A millionaire is suspected of buying an ad agency to use it as a way of brainwashing the public for his political ends. Hmm . . . subliminal messaging through inaudible sounds and images hidden in TV audio signals and magazine spreads . . . John Carpenter’s They Live, anyone?
The millionaire here is the mysterious Ted Quinn (Robert Mitchum) who buys out the giant Montreal ad agency Porter & Stripe where Philip Morgan (Lee Majors) serves as its top copywriter and project manager. Of course, as with any corporate takeover, half of the firm’s staff is soon blown out the door and replaced by “Quinn’s people.” And Morgan is getting the old “do you like your job” trope when he complains about being kept out of the loop on the firm’s new accounts.
Next thing you know, the firm’s geeky-and-too-nosey-for-his-own-good Sam Goldstein (very familiar Canadian actor Saul Rubinek), who discovered Quinn is using the firm’s new slew of commercial spots to influence a political election, ends up dead. Now it’s up to Lee and Valerie Perrine, as his love interest, natch, to get to the bottom of the advertising-cum-political tomfoolery.
I love Lee Majors, and Robert Mitchum is always cool in-the-role (but barely here; this is a Lee Majors joint, after all), but when cheapo Canadian tax shelters films masquerade as an American-made film by casting beloved U.S. actors in lead roles, what we usual end up with is, not a theatrical film, but a telefilm that pisses us off by baiting us with Lee Majors.
If this had been made in the early ’70s by a major U.S. studio, say MGM or 20th Century Fox — and cast Charlton Heston as the ad man discovering the subliminal political campaign — and had Paddy Chayefsky adapt Paul Gottlieb’s superior, best-selling novel for Sidney Lumet to direct — Agency could have been a twisted sci-fi version of the Academy Award-winning Network. Or we could have had Madison Avenue taken to task in a political paranoia thriller that reminded of director Alan J. Pakula and screenwriter Robert Towne’s The Parallax View.
I love my Lee Majors joints, but — through no fault of his own (his Fawcett-Majors Productions didn’t back this one) — Agency is a flat-as-a-pancake conspiracy thriller providing a non-intriguing conspiracy devoid of thrills. If you’re in the market for sci-fi conspiracy thrillers of the ’80s HBO-variety, then stick with Micheal Crichton’s Looker from 1981 starring Albert Finney — at least that one had some computer 3D modeling and funky light-hypnosis guns to wow us. Of course, when it comes to subliminal conspiracies of the Canadian variety, none is finer than David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.
You can watch Agency on You Tube or watch it as a free-with-ads stream courtesy of IMDb TV’s Amazon Prime channel (caveat: both are fuzzy VHS-to-DVD rips). In 2001, Anchor Bay issued a now out-of-print DVD version, which, no surprise, is the best of the DVD transfers in the market. If you’re a Lee Majors Canadian film completist, then you’ll want to seek out the 1984 TV movie The Cowboy and the Ballerina (we found a clip on You Tube).
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
“A dissatisfied twentysomething seeks life and relationship advice from a retirement home playboy played by Lee Majors, with mixed results.”
I mean, when you put it that way, you know I’m going to watch your movie.
Writer, director and lead actor William von Tagen made this auteur project. It’s the story of Ralph, a nursing home worker who dreams of being a science fiction writer.
Beyond Majors, the film also features Annie Bulow, Jessica Sulikowski, Bailey Heesch, Cassandra Lewis, Jane Merrow (who played Irina Leonova, a Soviet officer and scientist who was a love interest for Steve Austin on three episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man), Jennifer Levy, Jake Koeppl and Terry Kaiser, who the normal world knows as Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s but you and I know as Dr. Wachtenstein from Tammy and the T-Rex and Count Spretzle from Mannequin Two: On the Move.
Really, Majors and Kaiser are the best things in this movie, but it does have some unexpected twists and it’s not the worst independent film I’ve seen about finding yourself in your late twenties.
Shot where the TV series Dry Creek was made, Wild Bill Swift Justice is a retelling of the tale of Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok has settled down as a lawman in a small town, but now Marcus Roby and his gang threaten to destroy everything.
This is the second time this week that a bunch of actors that I loved starred in a movie that I hated for every second they weren’t on screen. I mean, Lee Majors and Martin Cove are in this movie and I still disliked it. That has to be some kind of feat.
Also — Jeff Fahey is on the poster and doesn’t list this on his IMDB. When Fahey doesn’t want anything to do with your movie, you know that you have a real problem.
Honestly, this movie had the production values of a 1990’s VCA Western adult film with none of the payoff. That sounds like a compliment but I assure you that it is not.
Trojan War cost $15 million to make, played one theater for a week and made $309 dollars.
Yes. $309 dollars.
It’s also a movie that features Jennifer Love Hewett as the geeky friend, which seems like casting that most boys in 1997 would not agree with. It’s kind of an extended version of the condom story in Amazon Women on the Moon, as Brad (Will Friedle, Boy Meets World) is finally getting the chance to aardvark with Brooke (Marley Shelton, Planet Terror), yet she demands he get a condom, which is where the title comes from.
There are a few moments that 80’s comedy fans will like, such as a homeless man demanding two dollars and it ends up being David Patrick Kelly, who was Luther in The Warriors. Or Anthony Michael Hall not being a geek but instead being a bullying bus driver, driving the bus from Speed. Seriously. The exact same bus, which is Santa Monica bus #2525.
For those enjoying Lee Majors week on our site, he shows up as Officer Austin and ends up giving Brad a condom, which makes a bionic sound effect as the rubber sails toward our hero. His call sign is also Seven Mary Three, which fans of CHiPs will recognize.
Of course, this being a teen comedy, our hero will find the right girl and all will work out. Along the way, there are appearances by Danny Masterson, Wendie Mallick (I never miss the chance to make a Dream On reference) and, as all 90’s movies must, a cameo from Danny Trejo.
This was directed by George Huang, who put up Robert Rodriguez when he was new to Hollywood. He also directed Swimming With Sharks and How to Make a Monster.
The soundtrack to this is pretty interesting, with a mix of 90’s stuff like Letter to Cleo, Star 69, Everclear and Imperial Teen mixed with unexpected artists like Fu Manchu and Peter Murphy.
All in all, it’s not the worst teen movie comedy I’ve seen.
As is the case with any actor who achieves a level of fame in the TV and film realms, Lee Majors, courtesy of his clout with The Six Million Dollar Man, was able to parlay his star into his own production company, Fawcett-Majors Productions, co-run with his then wife, Farrah Fawcett (the company dissolved upon their 1982 divorce). To help establish the company, during his 1977 contract negotiations for the series, Majors wanted his production shingle brought on as an independent producer in association with Universal Studios. While the negotiations soured between Majors, Universal, and ABC television, it didn’t matter: after five seasons, the show’s ratings, as well as those of its sister show, The Bionic Woman, declined, and both series were simultaneous cancelled in 1978.
Fawcett-Majors Productions made its feature film debut with the Vietnam war drama, Just a Little Inconvenience (1977) starring Majors, which aired on U.S. television. The company also produced the Farrah Fawcett-starring Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978) and Sunburn (1979) — both which flopped at the box office (and Saturn 3 sealed the deal on Farrah’s theatrical career). Meanwhile, Majors chose three films for himself, each which became popular, much-run HBO favorites: The Norseman (1978), Killer Fish(1979), and this action adventure — which, according to a 2015 interview with screenwriter Leigh Chapman, started out as Look Down and Die — about a rogue crew of The Magnificent Seven-styled steel workers against an evil corporation to complete a skyscraper project.
Now, if Leigh Chapman’s names rings a bell, that’s because she’s named dropped often around B&S About Movies with the blaxploitation classic Truck Turner, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Chuck Norris’s The Octagon (1980), and The Fast and Furious precursor King of the Mountain.
For his director, Majors picked the Roger Corman-bred Steve Carver, who brought us the Pam Grier blaxploitationer The Arena, along with the mob epics Big Bad Mama and Capone. Remember when Hollywood tried to turn Heavyweight Boxing champ Ken Norton into a movie star? Steve Carver directed it: Drum. Then there’s Carver’s Chuck Norris two-fer with An Eye for An Eye and Lone Wolf McQuade. And we recently reviewed his own Fast and Furious precursor: Fast Charlie . . . the Moonbeam Rider.
Returning to his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, and filmed in the surrounding Fayette County, Majors, acting as Executive Producer, pulled together all of the usual actors we care about here at B&S About Movies as his burly crew of steel workers: Jennifer O’Neill (The Psychic) as his construction damsel-in-distress, Art Carney (who co-starred with Farrah in Sunburn) as Pignose, George Kennedy (Top Line) as Big Lew, Terry Kiser (forever known as “Bernie” from Weekend at Bernie’s) as the ladies’ man, Valentino, character actor extraordinaire Albert Salmi (Escape from Planet of the Apes) as Tank, Robert Tessier (who got his start in the biker romp The Born Losers and co-starred with Burt Reynolds in The Longest Yard) as Cherokee, and the great Richard Lynch (Ground Rules) cast-against-type as a good guy (well, almost) with his character, Dancer.
It all starts with construction magnate Big Lew Cassidy — a guy who likes to get up the girders and get his hands dirty — who falls to his death (A.J Bacons, the stuntman who doubled for Kennedy, died when the airbag split on impact). So in steps Big Lew’s inexperienced, spunky daughter Cass Cassidy . . . and she’s determined to finish off the last nine floors and meet her father’s deadline before the bank forecloses.
But how?
By recruiting the best “ramrod” in the business. But according to Pignose: one’s dead, one’s on a project in Canada, and one’s in Saudi Arabia. So that only leaves the once great Harry Stamper(Bruce Willis) Mike Cattan (Lee Majors), but he washed-out of the steel biz to become a long-haul trucker. And, to be honest: Mike’s the only one crazy enough to fly to an asteroid to drill through a solid-iron rock attempt topping off an impossible nine floors in three weeks.
So, once Cass gets the reluctant ex-ramrod on board with the ol’ “I thought I was meeting a real man” speech, they’re off to recruit the “best of the best” (now this really is starting to sound a lot like Armageddon, sans the asteroid) to finish the job before Cassie’s slimy uncle Eddie (Harris Yulin!) and his partner Kellin (the always welcomed heavy, R.G Armstrong!) absorbs his estranged brother’s company.
While this Majors theatrical hopeful played in duplexes, triplexes and drive-ins, Steel — along with Agency starring Robert Mitchum and The Last Chase with Burgess Meredith — bombed at the box office. And the failure of the earlier The Norseman and Killer Fish didn’t help either. And, with that, Majors returned to a successful five-year run with ABC-TV’s The Fall Guy and a succession of successful TV movies throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, such as Starflight One, A Smoky Mountain Christmas, Fire: Trapped on the 37th Floor, and The Cover Girl Murders(which also starred Jennifer O’Neill).
Opinions vary on Steel. You can chalk it up to my youthful nostalgia for those HBO days of yore, but I love this movie and think it’s one Majors’s best. This is good ol’ fashioned, non-CGI filmmaking with real men on top of real steel girders, real prefabbed steel floors dangling from choppers, and real steel girders crushing real stretch Cadillac limos. And you can watch it all on You Tube.
As part of our May 2023 tribute to Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino’s weekly podcast tribute to their days at Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives, here’s the link to their take on this Lee Majors favorite.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on November 22, 2018. We are rerunning it as part of our “Lee Majors Week” of film reviews.
When I was a kid, there was an urban legend that Lee Majors moved to a small town outside Youngstown, Ohio, because the locals didn’t care what a big star he was. Everyone had an encounter with him, but many found his wife Farah Fawcett to be off-putting. I don’t know if these stories are true, but I want them to be. I do know that Lee and Farah did inspire the song “Midnight Train to Georgia,” though.
Let me sum this one up in short sentences: Priceless emeralds. Hidden jewels. Hungry piranha. Model shoot. Late 1970’s decor. Exotic Rio de Janeiro locations. Suspicion. Jealousy. More piranha.
Other than Lee Majors, this film is a cavalcade of my favorite stars. Well, maybe not favorite. But close. Karen Black is here! And there’s Margaux Hemingway, who is as good at being a supermodel as she is bad as an actress. And here’s James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) as the main guy you’re supposed to hate. And is that the doctor from Total Recall, Roy Brocksmith? Former NFL quarterback, NHRA drag racer and December 1980 Playgirl centerfold of the month Dan Pastorini come on down! Wow! It’s Anthony Steffen from The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave! And finally, it’s the man whose The Sixth Sense ruined the syndicated episodes of Night Gallery, Hour Magazine host Gary Collins, the bane of my childhood!
This whole mess (but we love it here at B&S!) is directed by Antonio Margheriti, who we all know and love as the creator of perhaps the finest movie ever made, Yor, Hunter from the Future. The film was also one of three films that Fawcett-Majors Studios co-produced in 1979 — the others being Steel (also reviewed this week, look for it) starring Lee, and Farrah’s Sunburn . . . with Art Carney and Charles Grodin!
Killer Fish is more caper than Jaws rip-off. But hey, how many movies have Lee Majors sitting in a limo with a cane that has a crocodile’s shrunken head on it, much less him swimming through piranha? And that’s why Lee rocks our VHS world at B&S About Movies.
God bless Christians and their end of the world movies.
Seven backpack nukes, code named The Seven Wonders, have been placed in the U.S. by terrorists as the result of the battle for Jerusalem. FBI Agent Shane Daughtry (David A. R. White, the co-founder of Pure Flix Entertainment, as well as the co-writer and producer of this movie) and agent Eve Rearden (Anna Zielinski) must find these weapons before they destroy the world. Or at least America.
Where does Lee Majors fit in? Well, he’s Arlin Rockwell, the arms dealer who smuggled the weapons into the country. There’s also a Russian-Iranian terror cell called The Revolution of God, Stacy Keach as a retired G-Man and Randy Travis, of all people, as the Deputy Director of the CIA. Ironically, there are two different songs in this movie and neither are sung by Travis.
So yeah. A Christian spy epic that I only sat through because I love Lee Majors. I really will watch anything.
Do You Believe? is kind of like Magnolia without the raining frogs, good music or characters that you actually worry and care about.
It’s the tale of a preacher who meets a street prophet who shakes him to the core.
And then you realize, hey, that street priest is Delroy Lindo and wow, the cast of this movie and the next thing you know, you’ve wasted an entire 115 minutes watching this.
The creators of God’s Not Dead got together a truly heavenly cast for this movie that’s kind of like Crash because it also has a car crash in it.
There’s Sean Astin as a kindly doctor, just holding out until he can get famous again when a monster from the Upside Down disembowels him! Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino! Alexa PenaVega from Spy Kids! Shark jumper Ted McGinley as that priest who has lost his faith! Cybill Shepherd, certainly in a place she never saw herself being in! Lee Majors, our reason for watching so many movies that we would have never watched if we weren’t doing a week of films in his honor! Brian Bosworth, who certainly deserves better! A rapper named Shwayze!
Look, I realize that a kid who grew up with apeirophobia — fear of eternity — and ouranophobia — fear of heaven — is not going to be the audience for this movie. Yet I know that Christian cinema can make astounding stuff like Ron Ormond’s films and A Thief In the Night. Why do contemporary Pure Flix movies play it so safe?
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