The Last Stop in Yuma County: A Nihilist Lark that Homages the 30th Anniversary of the Trantino Style

Local Boogeyman Productions
,
Random Lane Productions
,
Carte Blanche

MOVIE INFO:

While awaiting the next fuel truck at a middle-of-nowhere Arizona rest stop, a traveling young knife salesman is thrust into a high-stakes hostage situation by the arrival of two similarly stranded bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty–or cold, hard steel–to protect their bloodstained, ill-begotten fortune.

REVIEW:

Last Stop in Yuma County is a crime thriller set at a gas stop restaurant and hotel in Arizona sometime in the mid 1970’s. For most of its runtime it’s a lean and clever Tarantino knockoff about a bank robbery gone wrong. It’s brashness and refusal to take anything it shows the audience all that seriously are hallmarks of a young, first time director. Francis Galluppi takes two sociopaths who are killing time waiting for a fuel truck to arrive, a restaurant with a broken air conditioning unit, customers with hidden guns and creates some serious heat waves.

The main unnamed character (Jim Cummings), a knife salesman, straight and off kilter nervous as Psycho’s Norman Bates, learns of the soon to come bank robbers(Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan) on his radio. Out of gas and the gas station out of gas too, he is forced to wait for the gas truck that like Godot is never coming. Bank robbers pull up. Various respectable and disreputable customers, all hidden gun totters, pull up. Plot mayhem ensues.

Galluppi is content to let things unravel slowly, building character and tension, until he prankishly explodes it in a violent and bloody shootout that closes the door on the Tarantino homages. What follows is a twisty Coen brothers revenge film between the remaining survivors. A car trunk load of money is all the temptation, motivation and revenge needed. Death is the big joke of the movie, making Last Stop in Yuma County the ultimate nihilist lark of 2024.