The Last Resort (2009)

Review by Sean Patterson



The Last Resort is a tightly directed thriller that is ultimately too short to satisfy.
The premise of the movie is simple, if not entirely believable. A group of five girls is spending the weekend in Mexico, celebrating their friend's upcoming wedding. Alone. They spend their first night out drinking tequila and flirting. One of them, Sophia (America Olivo) even manages to find a cute guy to bunk up with for the night.
The next afternoon the girls, minus Sophia, who has overslept with her new "friend," take a couple of the locals up on their offer to go sightseeing. It turns out Sophia is lucky, though, as the girls are robbed and left for dead far out in the desert. As Sophia tries to track them down, the others are discovering the abandoned resort they've wandered onto might be worse option than baking in the desert...
Brandon Nutt does a good job directing the various actors against the beautiful scenery of what looks to me like real Mexico. Unfortunately, his flair for the visual is somewhat wasted as nearly everything else about the movie just seems average.
The movie's short length (under 80 minutes) both helps and harms. I usually like both horror and comedy movies to stay short. For comedies, there is only so long an audience can laugh before becoming tired. For horror, lingering on exposition can make a movie boring. And The Last Resort's short length certainly keeps it from ever getting boring. In fact, the movie is deftly edited and sails by quickly. In this case, however, the length also kept me from feeling as if I knew any of the characters, or even what sort of evil they are facing. When the real horrorshow kicks in during the last ten minutes, I found I didn't care too much about any of the women or whether they would survive. And even with a beginning scene setting the stage for the haunted resort, I really didn't understand the back story.
This probably has to do with the screenplay, which seems sparse and cliche. There are damsels in distress, a mysterious fortune teller, and muscular heroes. Come to think of it, the ending when these cliches end up meaning nothing is the best part. I know that's cryptic, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I'll just say that the prince charmings don't exactly save the day.
The acting seems awkward at first, with the girls establishing their individual, if mundane, personalities. They show why they were cast, though, when it comes to screaming and acting worried or criminally insane.
The movie could have been better if the resort itself was made into an interesting character, but it's just a collection nondescript rooms. Despite the promise of the movie poster, there is little nudity and no bikinis. While the dialogue, acting, and premise were all so-so, the reactions of the characters and the plotting always struck me as realistic. So it's not all bad, just average.