Welcome to the Diner of the Damned, Where the Coffee Is Cold and the Corpses Are Fresh
There are movies about bad nights, and then there’s Last Straw — a horror-thriller that makes every late shift, bad tip, and obnoxious customer feel like a walk through Disneyland. Directed by Alan Scott Neal and starring Jessica Belkin in a performance equal parts vulnerable and feral, this is the kind of movie that starts at a low simmer and ends with someone being deep-fried in cooking oil.
It’s messy, violent, and gloriously mean — the cinematic equivalent of watching Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore get mugged by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
And somehow, against all odds, it’s fun.
The Setup: Eggs, Bacon, and Existential Dread
Nancy Osborne (Belkin) is a small-town waitress at her dad’s diner — a place so rundown you can almost smell the old grease and regret through the screen. Her father, Edward (Jeremy Sisto), promotes her to manager, which sounds nice until you realize “manager” here means “the one responsible for everything that’s about to go horribly wrong.”
The diner is staffed by the world’s most dysfunctional breakfast club: Jake, the surly cook; Peter, his gentle brother with Down syndrome; and Bobby, the sweet, slightly naive waiter who seems one spilled milkshake away from a nervous breakdown.
Things start to unravel fast when Nancy vomits during her shift, leading to the revelation that she’s pregnant — and not the radiant, glowing kind of pregnant. No, this is the “I’m exhausted, nauseous, and still serving hash browns to drunk teenagers at 2 a.m.” kind.
Cue the moral breakdown, the workplace tension, and the world’s most poorly timed teenage prank.
Enter: The Masked Idiots
When a group of local punks decides to act out at the diner, Nancy snaps and fires Jake, the chef — the one person in town who can actually make eggs without summoning Satan. Her father scolds her, she storms off, and suddenly the diner is quiet. Too quiet.
Then, because this is horror and not a workplace comedy, a group of masked men shows up. And like any sensible person in a small-town horror movie, Nancy doesn’t immediately run. She stays to “see what’s happening.” (Spoiler: what’s happening is murder.)
The men start terrorizing her, killing a cop who shows up to help, and torturing anyone who gets in their way. Nancy hides, screams, stabs — it’s all very Home Alone, if Kevin McCallister were eight months pregnant and covered in someone else’s blood.
But then comes the twist: one of the attackers is Peter, the gentle janitor. Things go downhill faster than a hotcake on a greased skillet.
The Twist: Addicts, Murderers, and One Really Bad Brother
Turns out Jake — the cook Nancy fired — is behind everything. And he’s not just mad about losing his job. Oh no, he’s been moonlighting as a full-blown drug addict and part-time spree killer. After Nancy fires him, he kills the rowdy teens who caused the chaos in the first place, then ropes his brother Peter and a few others into helping him “prank” Nancy.
Because nothing says good-natured fun like pretending to be masked murderers while already being an actual murderer.
Naturally, things get out of control — a cop gets shot, people die, and Jake decides the only way to fix things is to keep killing until there’s no one left to tell the story.
It’s the kind of logic that only makes sense when you’re high, homicidal, or both.
Nancy Osborne: The Patron Saint of Bad Nights
Jessica Belkin’s Nancy is the kind of final girl you root for not because she’s pure-hearted, but because she’s so exhausted she’s beyond fear. She’s the embodiment of every underpaid service worker who’s ever thought, “If one more thing goes wrong tonight, I might just burn this place down.”
By the film’s end, she’s blood-soaked, battered, and literally held together by duct-taped slabs of meat she’s strapped to her body as impromptu armor — a practical effect so ridiculous it loops back around to genius.
When she finally turns the tables on Jake, stabbing him in the neck and collapsing on the road, it’s not triumphant — it’s cathartic. Like watching someone finally clock out after the longest shift in history.
The Diner: America’s Newest Circle of Hell
The diner itself deserves a co-starring credit. It’s the perfect horror setting: greasy floors, flickering lights, and the lingering smell of desperation. The deep fryer becomes a murder weapon, the backroom freezer a tomb.
Alan Scott Neal turns the cramped space into a claustrophobic nightmare, where even the ketchup bottle feels like it’s judging you. The camera glides through narrow hallways, occasionally lingering on mundane objects — salt shakers, napkin dispensers — that somehow feel loaded with doom.
If Waffle House made a slasher, it would look like this.
The Tone: Part Slasher, Part Soap Opera, All Chaos
Last Straw doesn’t pretend to be high art. It’s messy, occasionally melodramatic, and fully aware of its own absurdity. But that’s what makes it so fun.
The tone swings wildly — one moment it’s an intense hostage thriller, the next it’s a kitchen-sink drama about addiction and forgiveness. Then, before you can process the emotional whiplash, someone’s getting dunked in boiling oil like a McNugget.
And yet, it works. The absurdity becomes its charm. It’s a movie that asks, “What if every bad decision you’ve ever made came back to stab you — literally — while you were working the late shift?”
The Performances: Grease, Guilt, and Great Screaming
Jessica Belkin carries the film on sheer intensity. She’s every bit the reluctant warrior — scared, furious, and running on caffeine and trauma.
Taylor Kowalski as Jake is equally compelling, giving us a villain who’s not evil so much as pitiful. He’s the kind of guy who thinks murdering teenagers and faking a hostage situation will somehow make his boss rehire him. (Honestly, that might still be better logic than most corporate HR departments.)
Jeremy Sisto, as Nancy’s weary father, adds some emotional grounding to the chaos. He’s the classic small-town dad: perpetually disappointed, occasionally drunk, and just trying to make it through the week without another police report.
The Violence: Messy, Mean, and Weirdly Cathartic
The kills in Last Straw aren’t elegant. They’re sticky. Frying oil, knives, blunt objects — it’s like a horror cooking show where the secret ingredient is rage.
Every death feels intimate and accidental, which gives the violence an uncomfortable realism. It’s not a gleeful splatterfest — it’s a slow, escalating disaster where every mistake leads to another body on the floor.
And yet, it’s darkly funny. There’s something grimly satisfying about watching a pregnant waitress outsmart three drugged-out men using nothing but kitchen utensils and sheer spite.
The Ending: Hope, Horror, and a Side of Existential Crisis
By the time Nancy crawls out of that diner, bleeding and half-dead, she’s earned her happy ending — or at least a nap. Her father finds her on the road, sobbing, clutching her stomach, declaring, “My baby.”
It’s a surprisingly emotional note to end on. Beneath all the frying oil and blood, there’s a story about survival — not just from killers, but from life itself.
In a world where everything is one bad day away from falling apart, Last Straw reminds us that sometimes the only thing keeping you alive is pure, unfiltered stubbornness.
The Verdict: Horror Comfort Food for the Terminally Jaded
Last Straw isn’t perfect. It’s chaotic, occasionally clunky, and unapologetically trashy. But it’s also the kind of small-town horror movie that grabs you by the throat and refuses to apologize for being exactly what it is: loud, bloody, and defiantly human.
It’s Waitress meets You’re Next — if You’re Next had been written by someone with a hangover and a grudge against minimum-wage work.
Rating: 8/10 — A deliciously grim horror-thriller that serves revenge hot, greasy, and with extra fries.
