This is a hard-as-nails Western, featuring Charlton Heston and James Coburn in a bitter tale of bloody revenge.

Both Heston and Coburn worked with the legendary Sam Peckinpah, and this dark oater may be the best cowboy movie Sam The Man never made, right down to the bloody, slow motion violence that splatters across the screen.

Coburn is a chain-gang prisoner who busts out and, with a ragtag bag of psychos in tow, tracks down sheriff Heston who put him away a decade earlier.

But, other than loss of freedom Coburn has another reason for seeking retribution that casts Heston in a darker light.

A simple story, this scores with its well-sketched characters, salty dialogue and great sense of time and place: Heston and Coburn find themselves lost in a new world of telephone lines and other new technology, while the modern lawmen are unable to survive the harsh plains of the desert unaided.

The characters also live up to the title; these guys really are hard men, psychos that would give Clint Eastwood sweaty palms and have John Wayne scrabbling under the nearest rock.

Coburn's revenge is a twisted bit of sadism that the film surprisingly sees through; most movies today would wimp out and let the characters off the hook.

Heston and Coburn, two actors more interesting than usually given credit for, are joined by Barbara Hershey and Michael Parks, cited by Quentin Tarantino in a typical bit of hyper-exaggeration as "the world's greatest actor".

He isn't, but does offer able support as one of Heston's fellow lawmaking gunslingers.

Director Andrew V McLaglen began his career as an assistant director to the legendary John Ford, but the West of The Last Hard Men is wilder and meaner than anything McLaglen's mentor dared to put on screen.

Rob Daniel