By Simon Thompson
Director Alan Scott Neal and writer Taylor Sardoni’s Last Straw is a monotonous but strangely paced rural horror movie; the first half an hour or so sets up a decent, if still a little bit cliched, story and characters only to fall apart harder in the next fifty five minutes than Anthony Josuha’s chin. This collapse is made all the more frustrating because there are some solid performances and excellent cinematography on display in this movie- it’s just let down by a stupidly uneven script.
The plot of Last Straw follows Nancy ( Jessica Belkin), a young waitress who works in a diner run by her dad Edward ( Jeremy Sisto), who gives her the responsibility of running the restaurant for the night while he goes out on a date. Both bored out of her mind and forced to put up with her various colleagues’ character flaws, Nancy is suddenly accosted by a gang who have being moving from town to town on a killing spree, putting her into the terrifying position of having to survive the night.
Now, while this does sound like a pretty promising set up for a tight thriller/horror movie it’s completely let down by flimsy characterisation for everybody that isn’t Nancy, with most of the villains and the bumbling Officer Barbrady-esque Sheriff she calls to the scene being little more than mediocre pastiches of characters in better movies in the same vein, such as Straw Dogs and Deliverance, and coming across as irritating rather than intimidating.
While the performance from Taylor Kowalski as the antagonist Jake can be pretty much boiled down to him being a Poundland Flash Thompson, there is some solid acting to be found in Last Straw with Jessica Belkin’s performance as Nancy being assured and believable and Six Feet Under alum Jeremy Sisto also doing a decent turn as her father.
The problem is, as always, when you saddle good character actors with limited scripting and not much of a supporting cast to work with, their abilities are still not enough to bump up the overall quality of the film is because they still need a solid surrounding cast to bounce off, which isn’t something that’s provided here.
On the other hand, however, the cinematography by Andrey Nikolaev and the soundtrack by Alan Palomo are the movie’s only saving graces. Nikolaev’s moody and washed palette compliments the rural setting perfectly, and Palomo’s John Carpenter-infused beautiful 80s horror synth music is the perfect sonic backdrop that a movie of this nature needs. It’s a shame, however, that everything else about Last Straw doesn’t measure up to the high standards.
Overall, Last Straw is a movie lumbered by shoddy character development for the protagonist Nancy. Despite still being the best written character in the story, her various subplots, for example the will they/won’t they dynamic with her co-worker Bobby ( Joji Otani Hansen), are stale and uninteresting. This is a movie which promises so much, yet delivers so very little with the second half being tediously difficult to watch.
Last Straw is available now on VOD platforms.
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