User Reviews

The main selling point behind the Italian B movie - an American football team acting as commandoes (while still wearing their football uniforms!) to break a friend's daughter out of a seedy third world prison - made me want for a long time to track this movie down. However, I was sorely disappointed by the end results after finally getting a chance to watch it. Like most Italian exploitation movies of this era, the movie looks awesomely cheap and shoddy, but that didn't really bother me. What did bother me, however, was that the movie was for the most part surprisingly boring. The first 70 or so minutes are incredibly slow and uneventful, with pretty much no real action to be found. After those 70 minutes comes the commando raid, and sadly it is not worth the wait. While there are some nutty images (like the football players seen firing machine guns), the feel of the action is pretty ho-hum, and is over surprisingly quickly. It's easy to see why this movie, despite its headline cast of famous actors, never got picked up for North American distribution in any format. But as of this writing, the movie is available to see for free on YouTube... though I would advise you to pass on giving it a look.

Cliff Gaylor (Tobias) is a football player with an attitude. When his daughter Susan (Melissa Palmisano in her only screen credit) gets framed for having illegal drugs while on vacation in either a Caribbean or South American country (not really sure), and is imprisoned, Gaylor at first tries all the traditional channels to free her. He first goes to see his American Consul (Napier, here credited as "American Consul") but he's useless. He then goes to see a local lawyer (Balsam, credited as "Lawyer"), who also is incapable of helping him. So Gaylor then does the next natural thing: he calls his football coach (Borgnine, here credited as "Coach". Sensing a pattern here?) - and gets his entire football team to stage a commando raid on the prison, but not before arming and training them in the usage of machine guns. Of course, the whole team agrees and Coach "coaches" the mission. But they're going to have to get past sadistic prison warden Yashin (Silva) and his underling Prison Guard (Moldovan). Will the team be able to punt, spike, blitz, sack, snap, and tackle their way towards reaching their (field) goal? Find out today! The Last Match had a lot going for it: a strong cast, an amazing concept, and the football players in full regalia brandishing machine guns and grenade launchers visually just looks awesome. Unfortunately, the movie only really kicks into high gear in the final third. Most of the movie is a staid and bland "My Daughter's In Prison" drama with echoes of Midnight Express (1978). One thing Midnight Express did not have is a bunch of crazed footballers on the rampage shooting machine guns at Henry Silva while Ernest Borgnine happily gives instructions through a headset as to what to do next. Unless we blinked and missed that part. But because of the rarity of this movie, most people haven't gotten to see the cast of Borgnine, Balsam, Silva, Napier, Moldovan, and the footballers do their thing so audiences can decide for themselves. Had this been released on VHS in America during the golden age of video stores, it might have had a shot at being a well-known cult movie. Now it's just a not-so-well-known cult movie, which is only really justified by the last third.

Also of note are the "whosh-whosh" sounds on the soundtrack that sound like someone is waving a piece of cardboard in the air, Borgnine being especially jovial about his wartime experiences, the evil drug dealer who has a shirt that says "NEWS", and the subplot about saving an Elian-like kid from the third-world hellhole that is the unnamed country they're trying to escape from. Also there's a guy in the cast named Jim Kelly who's a White guy and not the Jim Kelly we all know and love. So to recap, the country is unidentified, half the characters don't have proper names, and the football team also has no name. We realize they didn't have the budget to use an NFL team name, but it would have been funny if they had come up with an attempt, like the "New York Sharks" or something to that effect. But then again, the way it is is pretty funny.

Another good thing about the movie is that the whole "Football Commandos" idea is played completely straight. It doesn't appear that the filmmakers thought this was a wacky or ironic idea - they seemingly thought it was a perfectly sane concept for an action movie. And thank goodness for that. We get more than enough irony these days as it is. Just look at the training sequence where fully suited up football players shoot machine guns at targets. That's why we keep going back to these Italian productions. They always seem to deliver in some way, shape or form. But the fact that a quality idea like this didn't really take off to its full potential shows that by 1991 things were starting to run out of gas. Much like Martin Balsam, who gives a bizarre, stuttering performance in a complete sit-down role. He seems really confused as he reads his lines off a piece of paper. Compare that to Borgnine, who injects the movie with some much-needed energy during the interminable first and second portions.

In the end, The Last Match has a killer concept, but ultimately doesn't hit the mark. Or score a touchdown, if you will.

Often, I refer to movies as having an all-star cast, which is really a misnomer. After all, what I consider A-list talent certainly does not fit the rest of the world. The Last Match, however, has the very definition of what I consider an all-star cast. Let's take a look at the lineup:

Ernest Borgnine: Amongst the 211 credits Mr. Borgnine amassed on his IMDB list, none other have him leading a football team against an unnamed Caribbean island to save his assistant coach's little girl. He was, however, in four Dirty Dozen movies and The Wild Bunch, not to mention playing Coach Vince Lombardi in a TV movie. One assumes that he took this role to get away from his wife Tova and her incessant cosmetics shilling.

Charles Napier: As the American consul in this movie, Napier cuts a familiar path, which he set after appearing in the monster hit Rambo: First Blood Part II. For him, it was either playing bureaucrats or cops, thankless roles that he always brought a little something extra to. The exception is Baxter Wolfe, the man who rocks Susan Lakes' loins in the beyond essential Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Henry Silva: If you need a dependable jerk and you have the budget of, well, an Italian movie about a football team that also does military operations, call Mr. Silva. He admirably performed the role of the heel - or antihero at other times in movies like Megaforce, Battle of the Godfathers, Cry of a Prostitute (in which he plays the Yojimbo role but in a mafia film; he also pushes Barbara Bouchet's face inside a dead pig's carcass while making love to her and he's the good guy), Escape from the Bronx and so many more movies.

Martin Balsam: Perhaps best known for Psycho, Balsam shows up in all manner of movies that keep me up at 4 AM on nights when I know work will come sooner than I fear. He's so interested in acting up a storm in this movie that he is visibly reading off cue cards.

They've all joined up for a movie that finds the coach's daughter get Midnight Express-ed as drugs are thrown in her bag at the airport on the way home from a vacation with her hapless jerk of a boyfriend. At least he's smart enough to call assistant coach Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), the father of the daughter whose life he has just ruined. And luckily for this film, Tobias was in a movie called Operation Nam nearly a decade before, which meant that they could recycle footage of him in combat. He also was The Stud and serviced Joan Collins, so he has my eternal jealousy going for him, too.

Who could dream up a movie like this? Oh, only Larry Ludman, but we see through that fake name and know that it's Fabrizio De Angelis steering this ship, the maker of beloved trash such as Killer Crocodile, five Karate Warrior movies and three Thunder movies that star the beloved Mark Gregory as a stiff legged Native American warrior who pretty much cosplays as Rambo. And don't forget - this is the man who produced Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and New York Ripper!

In this outing, he's relying on Cannibal Holocaust scribe Gianfranco Clerici and House on the Edge of the Park writer Vincenzo Mannino to get the job done. For some reason, despite this being an Italian exploitation movie, we never see the coach's daughter in jail. Instead, we're treated to what seems like Borgnine in a totally different movie than everyone else, barking orders into his headphones as if he was commanding the team in a playoff game.

To make matters even more psychotic, the football players show up in full uniform instead of, you know, commando gear. One wonders, by showing up in such conspicuous costumes, how could they avoid an international incident? This is my lesson to you, if you're a nascent Italian scumtastic cinema viewer: shut off your brain, because these movies don't have plot holes. They'd have to have actual plots for that to be possible.

I say this with the fondest of feelings, because you haven't lived until you witness a football player dropkick a grenade into a helicopter. Supposedly this was written by Gary Kent for Bo Svenson, who sold the script to De Angelis unbeknownst to the stuntman until years later. It was originally about a soccer team!

Former Buffalo Bills QB Jim Kelly* is in this, which amuses me to no end, as does the ending, where - spoiler warning - Borgnine coaches the team from beyond the grave!

You know how conservative folks have quit watching the NFL as of late? This is the movie to bring 'em back, a film where the offensive line has fully automatic machine guns and refuses to kneel for anything. No matter what your politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: no matter how dumb an idea seems, Italian cinema always tries to pull it off.

*Other pros include Florida State and arena football player Bart Schuchts and USFL player Mark Rush, as well as Dolphins Jim Jensen, Mike Kozlowsky, Elmer Bailey and Jim Kiick. It's kind of astounding that at one point, these players could just end up in a movie without the NFL knowing. This would never happen today.