A woman stands in a desert in the darkening twilight, looming over a man, tied to a chair, burning to death at her feet. This is Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus). She’s traveling dimension to dimension, methodically killing every version of Neville (Jeremy Holm), the serial killer who murdered her daughter. It’s a hell of a first image to kick off Kevin and Matthew McManus’s (The Block Island Sound) indie sci-fi thriller Redux Redux.
First-time feature writer/director Francis Galluppi’s crime thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County takes a simple, straightforward set up, fills it full of eccentric characters, piles on one complication after another, and ratchets up the tension and pressure until it must explode. It’s a hell of a first film, polished and sure-handed, and apparently caught the right eyes even before release, since the filmmaker has already been tapped to helm the next Evil Dead movie.
