Last Request has a very pungent aroma of B movie, but is enjoyable anyway thanks to a warm, feel-good vibe throughout. The cast includes Danny Aiello, Joe Piscopo and Gilbert Gottfried.
Aiello stars as a comedian father with six months to live. His last request is that one of his two sons marry and carry on the family line before he dies. When the obvious son Thomas - an inveterate swinger with ladies all over him - dies on his wedding night it''s left to fumbling son Jeff (played by T.R. Knight) to drop out of the seminary and get to work at finding a woman.
The rest of the film is made up of the mildly humorous hijinks of Jeff trying to find love in all the wrong places while it sits right under his nose in the form of rest home co-worker Cathy (Sabrina Lloyd). These hijinks are interspersed with nice scenes between Jeff and his father, Jeff and his highly questionable psychiatrist and the ridiculous mother and grandmother characters- the mother doesn''t seem to care about anyone but herself and the grandmother spends the entire movie on the floor, presumably because she had a terrible comic fall down the staircase at the beginning of the movie.
It''s an odd film - feels like it''s trying to be absurd in the style of a Leslie Neilsen film but never really pulls it off - the humor never draws a laugh and many of the characters are inexplicably lame and annoying. Yet the film succeeds on the strength of the friendship and advice shared between Aiello''s Pop character and Knight''s Jeff.
I''m not going to recommend you rush out to the video store to rent Last Request, but I can say that it''s an enjoyable enough film if you stumble across it sometime.
