The Last Stop in Yuma County
“Last Stop in Yuma County” is one of those movies where you root for the worst to happen because each successive calamity makes it more fun.
Written and directed by Francis Galluppi, “Yuma” is a very small period piece, it’s set in the Arizona desert about half a century ago. A lot of the action takes place at and around a diner and its adjacent gas station. The owner, a slow-moving but good-hearted man named Vernon (Faizon Love), tells travelers that the next station is four hours away, so they might as well fill up while they can. But the pumps are empty, and the fuel truck is late, so if anybody doesn’t have enough gas in his tank to keep going, he has to sit in the diner and wait. The central air isn’t working. The place is a hotbox. Tempers tend to flare at times like these.
Our entry into this story is a knife salesman billed only as The Knife Salesman (Jim Cummings), who appears anxious and depressed before he even says anything. He wants to get to Calabasas, California, to see his daughter she lives with her mother and stepfather there whose picture he keeps showing people on his phone when they really don’t want him to. His waitress is Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), an intelligent but weary woman who keeps trying to get customers to eat the rhubarb pie today of all days for reasons that may be less than entirely pure or innocent or unrelated to the story at hand. Charlotte’s husband is Sheriff Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.), who dropped her off at work earlier in the day.
The Knife Salesman and Charlotte hit it off immediately, but their conversation gets derailed by two more customers entering: Travis and Beau (Richard Brake and Nicolas Logan), two surly bank robbers whose faces are all over TV right now. Travis is smug and cold and has an insinuating, at times almost invasive way of speaking. Beau is an impulsive meathead who chain-smokes and wipes his armpits with napkins. Eventually, somebody’s going to recognize these guys.
As the film goes along, “Yuma” adds more characters and what’s the phrase for it? Not layers. The movie doesn’t have layers (it’s a single level thumb screw tightening comedy thriller), but that’s okay because so few American movies know how to do that, and it’s such a pleasure to see one that does. Maybe “trajectories” is the word for them. They’re all on some kind of trajectory; even if only in their minds. Their pit stop at this diner interrupts their momentum, then traps them in a limbo that becomes a purgatory that becomes hell on earth (the film could’ve been called “The Fuelman Cometh”). There’s an elderly married couple with a knitting wife (Robin Bartlett) and a husband (Gene Jones) who snores through half the film before waking up to become even more annoying than he already was by virtue of being Gene Jones as well as this character. Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), younger criminals who fancy themselves contemporary Bonnie and Clydeses, wind up there, too. Everyone in the place is carrying some sort of weapon or another, let’s put it that way, this is not one of those movies or places where everybody hugs it out at the end.
Galluppi also edited and it is clear that he has studied the collected works of the Coen Bros and Sam Raimi (including a repertory company member, Gene Jones was in “No Country for Old Men”), and absorbed a lot. If you see “Yuma County”, you’ll understand how he went immediately from this, his feature debut, to writing and directing an “Evil Dead” movie based on an original idea he pitched to Raimi.
“Yuma County” comes from the 1980s/’90s gritty American crime flick subgenre that included the Coens’ “Blood Simple” and “Fargo” and Raimi’s “The Gift” and “A Simple Plan” movies that made you laugh, then cut the laughter short with spectacular violence, then made you laugh again by having the characters continue to be their worst selves even as they bled out. (“Are we square?” Steve Buscemi’s kidnapper grimace growls in “Fargo,” holding a blood-soaked rag against the gunshot wound in his face.)
As good as it is, you wish it were better or had more to it all the way up to the final act. For a second there, it seems like it crested or ran out of ideas when there are another 30 minutes left. Then it takes a left turn into the kind of gloriously desperate black hearted comedy that defines a cult classic. Cummings is at the center of this final act, and he’s perfect anchor: He brings a tamped down variant of hyper verbal weasel persona he displayed in 2021’s “The Beta Test,” a black comedy about morally vacuous Hollywood agent who suffered greatly for his numerous sins but was too arrogant to learn and grow, Cummings is conventionally handsome in a way that would have been standard issue Anglo suburbanite in the ’50s but seems unreal and unnerving now; it’s a face from an ad for black and white televisions, his very existence is satirical.
But he’s more than an Eisenhower-era sight gag. You’ve never seen energy like this, from this kind of character, when played by Cummings, who’s been hoisted by own petards but denies that any hoisting occurred. He’s in peak form here. When the character is so unhinged that Cummings is flailing and stumbling and stammering and panic-whining, it’s like seeing Kermit the Frog in a film noir.
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.