Now available on DVD
Cast:
America Olivo as Sophia
Paulie Rojas as Amber
Marissa Tait as Kathleen
Sita Young as Beth
Arianne Zucker as Jessica
Nick Ballard as Rob
Directed by: Brandon Nutt
Review:
Someday I plan to write a horror film that will have all the great elements that would make for a sure-fire bloody, gory, nudity-friendly classic only to have it burn down in flames after a massive imaginative coronary where the plot development happens to get flushed out like a bad burrito.
Oh wait. Someone already did it. It’s called The Last Resort.
The set pieces are this. Five hot chicks. Two thieves. A Mexican hook-up. And a haunted, sexually repressed and depraved resort (yes, you read that right).
As I said before, all the elements that should make for a great supernatural horror film filled with ample amounts of nudity, gore and hopefully some frights, right? Nope. Not a damn one of these things happens in The Last Resort. In fact, I found myself asking how the director could f*** it up this badly given the hot cast, nice location and while not an original plotline a decent enough one that could offer up some good stuff.
Yet, we spend about 5 minutes peering into the supernatural Mexican resort’s sordid past where we see some crazy gringo kill some random chick only to get eliminated by Mexican locals that had come to end the terrors going on there. The trouble is, they don’t burn the place down or lock it up or even post warning signs everywhere. They leave it as is and just walk off. Insert your poor, Mexican joke here. Oh hell, I’ll give one. Did they run out of pesos for matches? Was there a donkey show they need to be on time for?
The next 30 minutes we see the five hot chicks â who are down in Mexico for a bachelorette party â get drunk, knee some gringo in the what-fors, talk about their sex lives, get more drunk, meet two dudes, one of which scores big time and goes home with one of the hotties and then the four other chicks decide to go sightseeing.
Now the only issue with the timing is this, the film is a svelte 67 minutes. So already we’ve killed 35 minutes, plus another two or three with the opening credits, of a film that’s not got a lot left to give in terms of horror.
Because their friend left with some random dude the night before, the four other ladies agree to go on a sightseeing adventure with two hombres in a van. Right away, they should have known something was wrong. Once a good distance away from the unnamed Mexican town, they rob the ladies, shoot one in the leg (the bachelorette) and leave them in the desert to die. Of course, they just happen to be right near the supernatural haunted resort and left with no choice they go there.
But before that happens, one of the friends calls Sophia (America Olivo, recently seen in the Friday the 13th re-imagining) to tell her they are getting accosted and to help them. So she and her one-night-stand try to get the policia to help. No dice. They try to get the locals to help. No dice. So they turn to a fortune teller that explains that the clocktower resort their friends told them about contains a great evil, a place where no one from the town goes because it turns them crazy and forces them to do depraved and outrageous things.
The poor girls that are forced to go there then are subjugated to these depraved and sexually deviant supernatural powers over the course of the last 15 minutes. The only problem is, they don’t show anything. Yeah, one chick eats some rotten tomatoes and nibbles on her dead friend and, yes, another chick likes to stab a boy after she’s given him a chubby but it’s all lame. Given the shortness of the film, you can’t say they could have expanded the payoff a bit unless they either didn’t either have the imagination to do something better or the budget.
Regardless, The Last Resort is terrible and you want something, anything better to happen. And then the credits roll and you’d wish you had watched a repeat of Lost because it probably would have not only made more sense, but given you more skin in the process.
