The Last Movie (1971)

An American movie company comes to a remote part of Peru to shoot a western. After the filming is over, a stuntman (Dennis Hopper) decides to stay behind with his prostitute girlfriend (Stella Garcia). But soon the villagers begin shooting their own "movie" with cameras made of sticks and acting out the violent western that the Hollywood company just made. Except, they don't know that movie violence is faked. Fresh off the success of EASY RIDER, studios were eager to capitalize on its success and Hopper received carte blanche from Universal to make his next film. The result was THE LAST MOVIE which was a critical and financial failure (though it did win a prize at the Venice film festival). It's an unholy mess of a movie, absolutely but not without some glimpses of what might have been. The film's beginning and ending are an incoherent mess. It looks like an expensive home movie with Hopper's actor friends meandering around looking for a movie to act in. But the movie's middle core dealing with the stunt man's relationship with his materialistic whore girlfriend, looking for gold with his pal (Don Gordon) and his involvement with a wealthy married woman (Julie Adams) is good enough that you can see what Hopper was aiming for. The rest is pretentious movie gibberish. With Dean Stockwell, Peter Fonda, Samuel Fuller, Kris Kristofferson, Russ Tamblyn, John Phillip Law, Sylvia Miles, Tomas Milian, Michelle Phillips, Michael Anderson Jr, Rod Cameron, Severn Darden and Toni Basil.