Last Of The Dogmen

Adventure, Western, Action

Tom Berenger	Lewis Gates
Barbara Hershey	Prof. Lillian Diane Sloan
Kurtwood Smith	Sheriff Deegan
Steve Reevis	Yellow Wolf
Andrew Miller	Briggs
Gregory Scott Cummins	Sears
Mark Boone Junior	Tattoo
Helen Calahasen	Yellow Wolf's Wife
Eugene Blackbear	Spotted Elk
Dawn Lavand	Indian Girl

Director	Tab Murphy
Producer	Joel B. Michaels; Thomas Hedman; Donald Heitzer
Writer	Tab Murphy

Lewis Gates (Tom Berenger) is a wilderness guide and bounty hunter living in Montana, Gates is a loner with a troubled past who has a strained relationship with the local sheriff (Kurtwood Smith) who is Gate’s Father-in-law. The Sheriff in his grief blames Gate’s for the accidental death of his daughter. One day several escaped convicts flee the authorities and head into the “Oxbow” range, a forbidding wilderness and the sheriff has no choice but to grudgingly hire Gate’s to track them down. Gates follows the trail of the convicts and finds the signs of a struggle, and patches of blood that point to the convicts grisly end either at there own hands or by someone else’s, he does find an intriguing and anachronistic clue in the form of a Native American arrow. Gates ponders the significance of this find and eventually takes the arrow to Professor Sloane (Barbara Hershey) an anthropologist working on a nearby archaeological dig; Gates is surprised to discover that the Professor is a woman. Professor Sloane tells Gates that the arrow is identical to those used by the Cheyenne Tribe, and specifically by the fierce warrior brotherhood known as “The Dog Soldiers” named after their habit of eating dogs, but the arrow cannot be authentic because the Dog Soldiers are extinct. Gates does some research and uncovers local stories about a boy raised in the wild and found by white men as well as the abnormally high number of disappearances of locals in the Oxbow dating back generations. Gates takes his suspicions to the professor and then heads of into the wilderness with the Professor reluctantly in tow, in search of the Dog Soldiers he believes are not extinct after all. The movie has plenty of action including police cars chasing gates who is fleeing on horseback and a budding romance between Gates and the Professor. The locations and natural beauty of the area are stunning and forbidding. Gate’s dog is also an interesting character that eventually has a lot to do with revealing the tough bounty hunters real character. While the trio searches for the impossible they are pursued by the Sheriff and his posse. The movie ending has many fantastic aspects The movies narrator (Wilford Brimley) is in a sense another character that adds perspective and drama to the production.