Last Straw

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.

Low budget does not always mean bad movie. I admire the guts of takes to put it all together let alone act and direct and so forth. However. Why make the lead character so unsympathetic and obnoxious? Dont you want the audience to sympathize and root for your lead characters? When you succeed in making them annoying AND stupid, no one cares about them. In some cases the audience may take the side of the bad guys. That is exactly what happens here. And this is BEFORE the reveals that are supposed to make our opinion change about the characters. Maybe some more script polishing was needed to bring this up to par. Still worth watching but couldve been better.

An interesting film to say the least. The first act does well at establishing our characters however the main character we are meant to root for is kind of a careless, aggressive and obnoxious teenager. This makes it less enjoyable to watch as I found myself less invested. Act 2 saves this movie from getting around 4 stars, I really like the twist of who is behind the masks as I think it adds an interesting dynamic to the movie and shows how mental some people can become. If this twist was implemented into a higher budget and better written script I think the concept could've really been perfect.

Was the motive weak? Sure, but I'm guessing they were trying to show that substance abuse can make bad situations in life worse? However I don't believe substance abuse= automatically turn into a deranged psychopath that doesn't think about their consequences. I also like how act 2 kind of showed us the other side of the story and a bit of the villains backstory.

Act 3 was, well it wasn't great. It felt very rushed and a bit cheesy. It left quite a few plot holes and things in the air. I understand it's meant to be a silly slasher but wow do some of these characters make some awful decisions.

Overall I definitely think the movie is worth checking out, i guess it's quite unique for modern slashers but just don't get your expectations too high as in places the movie is downright awful.

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]

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.