Made the same year as Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, The Last Movie was only possible after the grand success of Dennis Hopper’s low-budget countercultural phenomenon Easy Rider. Given the green light to set up in a remote Peruvian village, the anarchic production helmed by one of Hollywood’s loosest cannons achieved its infamy for reveling in psychedelic, decadent danger wilder and more wanton than the Old West that Sam Fuller recreates in the film-within-a-film. With the lines between reality and fantasy blurring both behind and on screen, Hopper plays a stuntman who stays behind after a film wraps in Peru. Alternatively looking for love or gold, he watches the native villagers as they incorporate the rituals and iconography of both cinema and the West into their lives, using real bullets. In taking Hollywood’s money and fleeing into the heart of darkness, Hopper also earnestly points an inverted mirror toward his own benefactors, who had to witness their investment beautifully implode into a fragmented, feverish, funny nightmare—including startlingly disruptive cuts, character personality changes and nonlinearity within nonlinearity—that ultimately out-counters the counterculture. – Brittany Gravely