"The Last Resort" DVD

I saw the trailers for The Last Resort and I confess that I didn't feel any too good about its chances going in. It looked downright cheesy, purely low budget. And though I did get cheesy low budget out of this one, I also got some half-decent shocks out of it and a few good thrills.

When one woman in a circle of five old friends is getting married, the remaining four set up a whomping great bachelorette party for her. Thus, they head down to sunny Mexico for fun, sun, drinking and more imitation phalluses than you'd ever really want to see. Special note to parents--keep the kids off this one unless you want to do a whole lot of awkward explaining. Anyway, four of them go out on a sightseeing tour the next morning (one of them stayed behind after she met a guy, and no, it wasn't the bride to be), and find themselves waylaid by thieves. Stuck in the desert, the foursome find an abandoned resort hotel that's hiding a deadly secret. Now, it's left to the last of the group of five, her newfound boyfriend, and his buddy to go out and find them before it's too late.

I actually had more than a little fun watching this--they do a pretty fair job of building some suspense here, and though they could have gone totally Hostel-overboard with some of this, they actually did exercise a bit of restraint. Restraint isn't easy to come by in movies like this.
Sometimes, though, the movie does have a bit of a tendency to get heavy-handed and gloss over explanations. I just saw this one but I'm still kind of vague as to what exactly went on to make that resort what it is today. Only kind of vague--I have a good idea--but I really shouldn't have to GUESS what they're going after.

The ending, meanwhile, is a cataclysmic downer and leaves more than a few questions behind. Sounds like someone was desperate to "challenge" the viewer and thus forgot to fill in some blanks. Or just decided not to....

The special features includ audio options, English and Spanish subtitles, and trailers for Frontier(s), The Slaughter, and an ad for Break.com.

All in all, The Last Resort isn't really bad--what's here is pretty good stuff--but it just has this oddly unfinished, incomplete tone to it that leaves it a little lacking.

The Last Resort
**
DVD

Directed by Brandon Nutt
Written by
Starring America Olivio, Paulie Rojas, Sita Young, Arianne Zuker
Produced by Chase Hudson, Ryan Reels, Forest Robin
R
74 mins
2009

The Video Store Guy knows the best movies you've never seen. Check his Reel Advice Tuesdays on Movieweb (www.movieweb.com)