If Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre taught us anything, it’s that you never want to find yourself stuck at a gas station that’s waiting for its next fuel delivery, especially if that gas station is the only one for miles. But just in case you were too busy chowing down on headcheese to get that memo, director Francis Galluppi is here with his directorial debut, The Last Stop in Yuma County, to get this point across.
Morality seems to be a fickle thing these days. Our newsfeeds are constantly clogged with an overabundance of wrongdoings and scandals. Making the right choice is no longer the obvious option anymore. This isn’t necessarily the case for the timid knife salesman who finds himself unexpectedly stuck at a smalltown diner waiting for the gas station next door to restock their fuel. Played by Jim Cummings, the knife salesman is surprisingly not very good at selling his Hitachi knives. He can’t even convince the waitress, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), that he’s peddling something worth purchasing. Instead, he fusses over a crossword, trying to come up with a four-letter word for “take the money and run” in between sips of coffee. But when he realizes that the two men who have also been forced to wait for the fuel truck are actually the very same men that are currently on the run for committing a robbery earlier that day, he tries to alert Charlotte and come up with a plan to get out of this all alive.
Of course, nothing goes according to plan, and the rest of Galluppi’s film runs rampant across the screen, thrashing its viewers left and right all the way up to the credits. While the plot is fairly simple—bank robbers hold a diner full of people hostage as they await a getaway (fuel) car—the movie is anything but. In fact, what starts off as a high-stakes, casual thriller eventually turns into a twisted morality tale about how the choices we make can sometimes even threaten to hold us hostage to ourselves. Taking someone for their word is another common theme in The Last Stop in Yuma County, and many characters find themselves at an impasse, unsure whether the person standing across from them is to be trusted. In the end, maybe everyone can be bought for the right price, or maybe some people just have bad luck.
But The Last Stop’s charms aren’t just in its underlying message. The film is also fun simply because it feels so familiar. It’s as if Galluppi took little bits of DNA from movies such as Pulp Fiction, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde and Death of a Salesman and melded them all into one spectacular experience. Throw in a dash of Creepshow—that moving ashtray was a subtle nod to one of Romero’s greats, right?—and All Quiet on the Western Front—swap out the butterfly for a bird and you’ve got yourself a similar ending—and The Last Stop feels riddled with all manner of cinematic influence. The film also happens to have a delightful cameo from one of horror’s favorite leading ladies, Barbara Crampton, who takes on a bit role as the sassy secretary to the local police chief. It’s clear that even though there is a severe lack of corpse reanimation occurring in The Last Stop, the film is still heavily steeped in horror, making subtle nods to the genre at every twist and turn.
The Last Stop in Yuma County is what would happen if Quentin Tarantino directed a version of 3:10 to Yuma starring Ash and Linda from The Evil Dead, just with fewer deadites. It’s an action-packed 90-minute ride that will never leave you feeling cheated or disappointed in the outcome. Galluppi made sure to fill his tank all the way for this one, and we can only hope that his next film is just as well-oiled and ready to hit the road.
Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment
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