The Last Border (1993)

From the finnish wilderness comes this violent and gritty post-apocalyptic western, The Last Border. Hated by most of those who have seen it, but loved by us that understands the mening of such a movie. It was directed by Mika Kaurismäki, brother of arthouse-favorite Aki Kaurismäki. None of them are appricated in finland, but in the rest of the world these guys are geniuses. When it comes to Aki he can be too pretentious, but that depends on the mood the viewer is in. Mika, on the contrary, is always just silly, arty-trashy fun for the mature part of the family. What the f**k, he’s the best!

It’s basically another "man with no name"-movie with a longhaired bum who seeks revenge on his fathers death (told in slow-motion flashbacks). What we can understand is that the terrible and dangerous gang-ledare "Duke", played by Jürgen Prochnow, is the murderer. He and his gang of motorcycle-madmen terrorises the post-apocalyptic landscape and has alos kidnapped a beutiful girl that our hero (of course) finds interest in.

After being hurt in a motorcyclechase our hero, soon named "Hawk", finds shelter at an old witch and her retared son. But it don’t take long until Duke and his gang of bandits is after Hawk...

This movie has everything an italian post-apocalyptic movie should have, except that it’s a finnish movie with mostly finnish actors and a score filled with finnish heavy metal. How strange it all can sound this is a very solid piece of entertaining cinema. Made in 1993 it was long after the big post-nukie-trend and it might be one of the reasons that it never got that popular. But with a movie with characters named Hawk, Duke, Borka, Skunk and so on I can understand why this haven’t been elected into the nuke hall of fame.

But it has one small problem. The middle of the movie is to slow. It concentrates the story on the relationship between Hawk, the girl and Borka. Not a bad thing, but it never works out that well. But the last 20 minutes it’s good old classic post-nukie again (with a italian western set up and also a small gladiator-fight). It’s also a very dark movie. After watching all the italian flicks with bright sunlight and sweaty closeups of mean men we get here a wet and rainy future with dirt, dirt and a lot of dirt.

I want to see this on dvd now and I think all you fans of these movies should be pleased after watching this flick.