Don’t Stop Here, Not Even For the Pie
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: A traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings)—we never get his name—low on gas stops at a desolate combo filling station/diner/motel in desert-Arizona’s Yuba County—with a sign bragging about their rhubarb pie—only to learn from attendant Vernon (Faizon Love) the pumps are empty as are all within a 100-mile area, but a fuel truck’s expected soon so he’ll just have to wait. However, through a cut-away shot we see there’s nothing to wait for because the truck’s laying on its side somewhere else just off the highway, the driver killed when the truck flipped over, gasoline pouring into the sand. Back at our primary location the salesman hears on radio news about a bank robbery that morning in Buckeye (actual city near Phoenix), robbers escaping with $700,000 in an old green Ford Pinto with a damaged rear end. Soon, a car pulls up with waitress/cook Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) dropped off by her husband, Sheriff Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.). After she opens up, the salesman comes in for coffee and pie, chats with her a bit, tells her he’s on his way to coastal Carlsbad, CA (near San Diego)—a world away from this baked-dry area—for his daughter’s birthday.
Then, the bank robbers, fierce Beau (Richard Blake) and slightly-goofy Travis (Nicholas Logan), arrive, also low on gas so they come inside to wait as well with the salesman recognizing their car, quietly tells Charlotte who they are. She tries to make a casual call to Charlie, but suspicious Beau stops her, cuts the phone cord. Beau demands they act casual to anyone else who comes in or they’ll be shot, because these guys will be here until the fuel truck arrives or at least someone with more gas in their car. Beau tells Travis to go talk with Vernon to see if there’s anyone at the motel or any gassed-up cars around, with Vernon telling him there’s neither. At the same time, Charlie’s deputy, Gavin (Connor Paolo), stops by to pick up some coffee to go, with Charlotte attempting to write “help” in one of the cups; however, as Gavin’s headed back outside he bumps into Travis, spills the coffee, throws away the cups, goes back for refills, but now she can’t leave a new message because there are too many eyes close to her. Tensions continue to mount as new arrivals appear: an older couple from Texas, Robert (Gene Jones) and Earline (Robin Bartlett)—complaining of the heat because there’s no air conditioning today in the diner—a young couple, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), looking to become criminals, and Pete (Jon Proudstar), a local Native American rancher who does have a gassed-up truck, so Miles pulls his gun, demands the keys to it.
⇒That doesn’t accomplish much, though, because almost everyone except the increasingly-frightened salesman and Charlotte has a gun so there’s lot of potential firepower pointed everywhere as Beau grabs Charlotte, threatens to kill her even as Pete tries to spare her life by giving up his truck to the robbers. It all comes to quick chaos, though, as Charlotte has a hidden kitchen knife, stabs Beau in the leg, guns go off, with only the salesman and Sybil left alive, her about to kill him when he springs a fatal knife on her, then picks up a pistol, finishes off wounded Beau. The salesman goes outside, opens the Pinto’s trunk so he can grab the cash but is interrupted when a couple, David (Sam Huntington) and Sarah (Alex Essoe), with a baby show up. Somehow, a scuffle breaks out, ending with the salesman killing both of the parents, then siphoning gas from Pete’s truck so he can put some in his tank, drive away. By chance, Charlie and Gavin arrive at the diner, the husband curious why his wife’s earlier call ended so abruptly; horrified, they find all the dead bodies with Charlie grief-stricken at Charlotte’s death, so he's down the highway hoping to find the salesman (Gavin noted what his car looked like), which he does because the stolen gas didn’t take him any farther than the overturned fuel truck. With Charlie convinced the salesman killed Charlotte they get into a conflict, with gunfire fatally wounding the salesman while also igniting the fuel, engulfing Charlie, leaving the only characters we’ve met in this film still alive at the end being Gavin waiting back at the diner with the baby.⇐ (I know that’s a lot of Spoiler info, but if you truly want to get the full impact of this film there’s a lot toward the end you don’t want to know before you see it.)
So What? It’s difficult to talk about the ways in which this film might catch you off-guard without talking about what’s in my Spoiler alert, but I will say it has Shakespearian-aspects when compared to how his tragedies resolve (with commentary on aspects of human weaknesses as those stories unfold), although a more contemporary comparison might be to Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015; review in our January 21, 2016 posting—of course, that contains Spoilers too, so consider that if you care to watch this vicious look at the Old West). For that matter, what we encounter in … Yuma County also has resonance with 2 other films I highly admire, also set in the modern violent West: Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016; review in our December 8, 2016 posting, 4½ stars) and Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016; review in our August 26, 2016 posting, 4 stars). If you put those 2 together with The Last Stop … you’d have a hell (pun intended) of a triple-feature; then, if you expanded to a quadruple-cluster with the … Eight there’d be useful—although disturbing—historical context, but after watching all 4 of them you might have some trouble sleeping.
In fact, if you really want to bring in obscure references to how … Yuma County relates to the grand tradition of narrative I suppose I could also encourage the citation of the imposing unities of action, time, and place developed in Italy in the 1500s, supposedly based on Aristotle’s ancient writings of the Rhetoric and the Poetics for how dramatic tragedies for the stage should be constructed, which demanded such plays take place in one location, over the course of just one day, with the action in a primary situation constrained to fit the other 2 requirements, so our current film fits the time and action concepts with the only additional place being where the fuel truck ran off the road (as far as time goes, everything in this film takes place in a chronological flow except for the minutes needed for the salesman and Charlie to drive to the fuel truck, a most unusual cinematic structure these days), so if you need to refer to Last Stop … as a classic, you could make an argument about that (at least in an academic mode, these classical overtones not usually found in contemporary cinema).
It’s not surprising if you haven’t heard much—or anything at all—about this film because it’s gotten scant critical notice, minimal info on Box Office Mojo about what income it’s taken in, and I wouldn’t be aware of it at all had I not seen a brief notice by Randy Myers in The (San Jose, CA) Mercury News (scroll down within this link to see his comments on ... Yuma County, as he addresses other cinema-options too): “Expect to hear the name Francis Galluppi mentioned far more in the future — that is, if this knockout feature debut, a sly, lethal slice of bloody neo noir, portends what the screenwriter and director has in store in the future,” encouraging words which I re-discovered last weekend in a pile of possibilities I keep nearby when I’m trying to find something to review for this blog, this one an absolute winner. Yet, given my self-imposed Spoiler limitations, I can’t say much more about what makes it so effective except the acting is all top-notch by a bunch of folks I’m not familiar with and the result approaches the time-honored concepts of film noir even though this story takes place in broad daylight with no rain, a femme fatale, odd angles, or voice-over narration (there are venetian blinds, though), yet it easily evokes the traditions of memorable movies from The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) to Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) to Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974),* all of which were influential on the ones I cited above, along with … Yuma County.
*Robert Towne won an Original Screenplay Oscar for that fabulous film (overall it might have won more had it not been competing with The Godfather Part II [Francis Ford Coppola, 1974]) with excerpts from that script included in many books I’ve read on screenwriting; he has just died, age 89.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Hard to locate this obscure-but-impactful film anywhere in a theater now even though it was released to some of them on May 10, 2024, bringing in at least about $41.5 thousand for its debut (very little info available beyond that), but it’s easily found via streaming on Apple TV+ for a $4.99 rental. Should you choose to seek it out you’d find plenty of CCAL support as Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews are a magnificent 96% while the Metacritic average score is also encouraging at 72% (a reasonable degree of enthusiasm from this site which often doesn’t even get into the 80% range, let alone higher). I think I’ve said about all that I can about The Last Stop … without getting into uncomfortable-revelations for those who haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll give a parting shot to Variety’s Owen Gleiberman who’s successfully been at this critic-business much longer than me: “[…] set at a gas-food-lodging stop in sunbaked Arizona, is what you might call an exercise in Tarantino knockoff nostalgia. It’s a lean, tight, and stylishly clever B-movie about a bank robbery gone wrong. It’s set in a period that’s never named but that feels like the late ’70s (rotary phones, a Bigfoot for President T-shirt, a general lackadaisical nowheresville-in-the-desert atmosphere). […] But the distinctive post-QT element is the brashness, the way the film refuses to take anything it shows you all that seriously. […] Since the air conditioner is on the fritz, you can almost see the heat waves. The place becomes a suspenseful pressure cooker.” I'll agree.
What I can do, though, is wrap this up with my standard device of a Musical Metaphor, which in this case I’ll take directly from the film’s soundtrack as it plays over the closing credits, the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live For Today” (on their 1967 album of the same name; original version in Italian by David “Shel” Shapiro and Mogol, lyrics rewritten in English by Michael Julien) at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HKvxZyM5QdA where it’s used in a sort-of-Metaphorical-fashion itself as it talks of people “chasing after money / And dreams that can’t come true,” while the singer and his lover will “take the most from living / Have pleasure while we can […] And don’t worry ‘bout tomorrow,” because, as The Beatles said long ago (Revolver album, 1966) "Tomorrow Never Knows" if it will even be here for any of us, especially the traumatized-characters in The Last Stop in Yuma County. Before you go, though, here’s another song from the film’s soundtrack, Roy Orbison’s "Crying" (on his 1962 album named for the song; please note: weird lyrics show up on this link from a 1965 concert, from roughly the only time I saw Roy live, at the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo Rock and Roll Show), used in roughly the middle of the narrative yet foreshadowing what will surely be felt by many unseen-characters connected to the ones we do meet in this raw, offbeat, compelling story.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
(1) IMDb's TV and Streaming calendar for July 2024; (2) Variety's 10 Best Movies of 2024 (so far) (no comment from me yet as I’ve seen only a couple of them); (3) What's new on Netflix in July 2024; (4) What's new on Amazon Prime Video in July 2024; (5) What's new on Hulu in July 2024; (6) What's new on Disney+ in July 2024; and (7) What's new on Max in July 2024.
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