Posted in: Blu-Ray, Movies, Review | Tagged: b movie, Francis Galluppi, Last Stop in Yuma County, pulp crime

Last Stop in Yuma County: An Effective Genre Exercise, Not Much Else

Last Stop in Yuma County is a perfectly efficient low budget indie pulp crime neowestern flick that's unfortunately no more than that

Last Stop in Yuma County is a curio, a pastiche of low-budget crime movies that used to be Hollywood's bread and butter in the 1970s and the type of, again, postmodern pastiche that Quentin Tarantino made that launched his career. First-time director Francis Galluppi certainly loves the genre, maybe a bit too much, as the movie doesn't do much to surprise us and make itself memorable.

Last Stop in Yuma County takes place in 1970s Arizona, which sets up the filmmakers' nostalgia for a bygone era and gets rid of the inconvenience of smartphones making crime stories more challenging to write these days since much of the suspense that filmmakers depend on is based on people not being able to get in touch with each other immediately. That would often solve many real-life problems but deprive storytellers of an easy way to create suspense. To wit: a traveling salesman (Jim Cummings) stops a gas station to find the tanks are empty and the day's gasoline delivery is late, so he decides to wait at the neighbouring diner to wait for so he can fill his car and continue to California to attend his young daughter's birthday. The only waitress is the local sheriff's wife (Jocelin Donahue), and when two bank robbers (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan) show up and more patrons show up, all stranded and needing gas, a standoff occurs. The rest of the story is how anyone comes out of this in one piece, if at all.

You can see all the better pulp crime movies and stories bubbling away under Last Stop in Yuma County, but the flaw is its lack of anything new, any surprise or humour in the story that lifts it above the merely generic. Every character is a type and nothing more. The plot unfolds like a puzzle, solving itself without any interesting themes or moments that make the movie memorable. It's an exercise in pastiche and feels like a showreel or filmmaker's calling card. Galluppi shows he is a skillful and efficient director but doesn't seem to have anything to say. He would certainly do a good job on any movie he gets hired to make next, but he has established he is a good journeyman director and nothing else so far. This is the kind of low-budget indie crime flick you might watch when there's nothing better on, and you won't remember it after it's over.

Last Stop in Yuma County is now out on VOD and Blu-Ray.

Last Stop in Yuma County

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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7/10

A perfectly efficient low budget indie crime movie that feels like a new director's audition or showreel. Lacking in any memorable characters, humour or surprise, this passes the time but you won't regret watching it, but you won't remember much after you finish, especially when a more interesting movie comes along.

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