Last Straw

After discovering that is pregnant, the waitress of the diner Flat Bottom Bistro Nancy Osborn (Jessica Belkin) drives to work but her old car breaks down and she needs to walk. She gets a bicycle ride from a co-worker and arrives late, and her father Edward Osborn (Jeremy Sisto), who owns the diner, calls her attention since he has just promoted her to manager. He assigns her to the night shift and goes to meet his girlfriend. When a group of masked teenagers driving mopeds arrives at the diner to disturb them with pranks, Nancy pretends to call the police, and the guys leave the place but promise to return later. However, the employees Jake Collins (Taylor Kowalski), his retar.ded brother Petey (Christopher M. Lopes), Bobby (Joji Otani-Hansen), who has a crush on her, and Coop (Michael Giannone) do not help her. They have an argument, and Jake offends Nancy and says that she is the manager only because the diner belongs to her father, and she fires him. During the night, Nancy stays alone and out of the blue, she is scared by masked men. She calls the police, but they are not able to immediately come since they are attending another case, and they believe it is a prank of teenagers. However, Sheriff Brooks (Glen Gould) arrives at the diner to calm Nancy down and does not give much attention to her. But when she mentions the mopeds, the Sheriff immediately asks her to go with him to his car since he has just come from a massacre of teenagers with mopeds. But he is killed by the masked man with a hammer and Nancy runs and hides herself. Who are the killers?

"Last Straw" (2023) is a gore slasher directed by Alan Scott Neal with an interesting screenplay divided basically in two parts. The first part follows Nancy, and the second part follows the crack-addicted killer and his crew and his slaughters. The subplot of the pregnancy of Nancy and the last scene are poor and a waste of time. The special effects with gore are great. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): Not Available.

Last Straw is pretty straight forward with no twists or turns as it's predictable. In fact I was able to predict what was to happen before it occurred. The movie is pretty realistic with it's violence and kill scenes. The problem I had with this film was that the story line was pretty linear throughout without much substance. I was looking and hoping for more but then sadly dissapointed. The movie kind of has a Strangers film vibe toward the beginning but then that quickly fades away when we learn who the major players are. Last Straw still manages to get more right then wrong in it's 90 minute run time. Last Straw gets a solid 6 stars out of 10 from me.

Last Straw'ss story is not entirely unique, there is a simple setup of a home invasion movie but instead of a normal house it's a Diner. Also the movie introduces a few things that I didn't expect but that weren't entirely unpredictable. The main character is flawed and it's a little bit hard to root for her but since she is making it through a very tough time in her life you get where her anger is coming from. But that doesn't explain her extremely stupid decisions throughout the movie. There were multiple scenes where she did something so dumb that a part of me just wanted to see her being killed. I don't mind when characters don't always make the most logical decisions since they are not sitting in front of a screen watching the movie, but instead are in a life threatening situation. But in this case it was really hard to root for her because of her constant stupidity. On the other hand there are also characters that just act unreasonable. This made it really hard to really concentrate on what was going on in the movie and therefore that effectively harmed the enjoyment of watching. Speaking of, I mostly enjoyed the movie and I was rarely bored which is nice. On a technical level the movie was also pretty solid and the acting was mostly pretty decent . However the final result is not to overwhelming and like I said at times you just want to slap some of the characters to come to their senses. [5,5/10]

What starts out as a 'siege' thriller develops into something rather original in its dissection into small midwestern lives of bored teenagers with nothing to do, ampted up on meds for bio polar and depression , smoking crack for release, and with limited funds; it also works as a pertinent tale of pranking gone wrong . Something young people should see and learn from!

It may bore those looking for gore and masked intruders looking to settle scores but that would be derivative , what it proposes is how these bored teenagers act- ok it ain't Rivers Edge but it's sharp and different.

The chilly photography and sparse soundtrack work well and whilst the title Last Straw works the (?) original title 'The Late Shift' works better.

I would have given this a 7/8 had it not been for the essentially braindead and completely unnecessary last 20 minutes. It's not the worst thing ever so would recommend giving this a view but the end was completely illogical. The acting was good, the story was good but the ending really spoils it. Everything that was built before was 'realistic' as far as a horror movie can be including decisions by characters etc but then they just decided to just mess it up by making the well woven main characters do things that completely takes you out of the movie and say 'wait, why, wtf'. The director could have done really well with this but decided to trope out.