The Last Straw (2024)

Following its UK premiere at Frightfest Glasgow, Blue Finch are releasing this rough around the edges 1970s-era Wes Craven-style thriller on Digital.

19 year old Nancy (Jessica Belkin) is promiscuous, pregnant, and feels her life is going nowhere in the grim backwoods town where she lives. Her father (an almost unrecognisable Jeremy Sisto from Lucky McKee's MAY)) owns a roadway diner, The Fat Bottom Bistro, and has promoted Emily to manager, much to the chagrin of the other staff.

When Emily has an aggressive run-in with four louts, and ends up firing staff member Jake (Taylor Kowalski) it's just the start of a day that is going to get worse and worse, culminating in violence, mistaken identity and multiple deaths, all centred on the bistro.

THE LAST STRAW has the makings of a good film buried deep within its script. Unfortunately this is not it. Moments that should be suspenseful, shocking or touching are all handled poorly by first-time director Alan Scott Neal. Perhaps the biggest mis-step of all is in making the lead character of Nancy so relentlessly annoying and unpleasant that it quickly becomes difficult to care about anything that happens to her. Combine that with damp, grim, seedy locations and the 83 minute running time feels a lot longer. If Wes Craven had made a movie with this kind of subject matter at the beginning of his career, it might have been a classic, making THE LAST STRAW feel like even more of a missed opportunity. Here's a trailer:

THE LAST STRAW is out from Blue Finch releasing on Monday 23rd September 2024