Debut features are usually the best movies to look out for if you wanna learn something. They're always heavily constrained. The filmmakers need to work within those limitations. This is often the only chance that a director gets to show what he or she can do.
Francis Galluppi's first feature falls into that rare camp of having a lot more good stuff going on for it than bad stuff.
Just like a lot of first features, the majority of the movie takes place in one location -- a diner next to a gas station in the middle of the desert. The year in which the movie was set wasn't mentioned exactly; but, the presence of a Ford Pinto seems to place it somewhere in the 70s to early 80s. It's definitely a movie that needed to be set before the age of cell phones.
The plot is pretty simple. A down on his luck cutlery salesman is en route to visit his daughter for her birthday. He needs gas. The gas station is out of gas and the truck is running late. He hears about a bank robbery over the radio which describes the getaway car as a green Ford Pinto with damage to the rear.
Guess who else needs gas.
The movie did a great job of establishing the characters across the board, as we're gradually being introduced to an ever growing cast of stranded patrons.
In fact, some veteran writers should take some advice from Galluppi in regard to efficency. The movie has a runtime of 90 minutes and you have a good sense of who all of the dozen people are with enough time left over for the movie to wrap up nicely.
The tension is maintained consistently throughout. The performances were strong. The direction was creative without being too flashy.
Well, it wasn't too flashy, for the most part.
The last scene in the movie looked nice because it was shot at sunset. It also made no sense. The movie starts with the diner being opened in the morning and ends at sunset...in Yuma...in the Summer. The events of the movie would have had to have taken place over the course of fourteen hours or more. Some of the dialog in the movie made that impossible, not just implausible.
Still, that's just me pointing out a gripe that I had with an otherwise solid movie.