Sometimes it’s ok to wear your inspirations on your sleeve.

“The Last Stop in Yuma County” follows a group of strangers (Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, Faizon Love, and Michael Abbott Jr.) who get stranded at a remote Nevada diner, and tensions begin to rise as not all of them have innocent intent. Francis Galluppi writes and makes his directorial debut.

Often when you think about crime dramas with sprinkles of dark comedy, the Coen brothers come to mind, with the likes of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “No Country for Old Men.” You may also think of Quentin Tarantino and “The Hateful Eight” and “Resevoir Dogs.” And “The Last Stop in Yuma County” makes no attempts to hide the fact that it knows you’ve seen these films before, but that’s part of its charm.

I’m a big fan of Jim Cummings, I think he’s great neurotic fun in both of his directorial efforts “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” and “The Beta Test.” He’s the de facto lead here, and has some amusing line deliveries and serves as the voice of the audience (like promising to not be a hero when a criminal has a gun pointed in your face). Richard Brake is known for playing creepy bad guys and he does just that here, and he adds a sense of menace to an otherwise fairly innocent-looking town.

The film does a good job establishing mood and atmosphere, you feel hot and sticky alongside our AC-less characters, and when someone mentions a coffee refill or slice of diner pie you start thinking that that actually sounds good right about now.

Some of the screenplay by writer/director Francis Galluppi is amusing, though he does do something I personally get turned off by in films and that’s add expletives to sentences simply for the sake of it. I get it, adults swear and criminals want to seem intimidating, but at times it comes off inorganic. Tarantino is known for his colorful language yet his dialogue is so sharp that the swear words blend in seamlessly with the rest of the sentence, instead of standing out like a dull knife.

Overall I enjoyed “The Last Stop in Yuma County.” There are a few “what would you do in this instance?” moral quandaries, as well as some well-staged conversations and tense sequences. At 90 minutes it’s easy to recommend and consume, and I can see myself rewatching it every few August afternoons (with a slice of reubarb pie, of course).

Critics Rating: 7/10