jim cummings

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

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When watching Last Stop in Yuma County last year, my viewing companion mentioned that he had quite enjoyed The Wolf of Snow Hollow, another vehicle for Yuma lead Jim Cummings. Cummings first gained recognition for his feature film Thunder Road, which was an extension of his earlier short film of the same name. I remember seeing the trailers for Thunder Road at the Alamo Drafthouse during that summer that MoviePass was acting as a real-life free movie hack, but its time in theaters was relatively brief and I still have not managed to check it out. Per some contemporary reviews citing Cummings’ character in Snow Hollow as merely a variation on the one that he portrayed in Thunder Road (negatively), that may be for the best, as I came into Snow Hollow with no expectations. 

The film opens on the arrival of a young couple to a short-term rental in Snow Hollow, Utah. After the two relax for a bit in the hot tub, PJ (Jimmy Tatro) goes into the house to shower (and grab the engagement ring with which he is about to propose) while his girlfriend turns off the hot tub, but she’s attacked by someone or something that tears her to pieces. The local police arrive, and it becomes clear that deputy John Marshall (Cummings) is covering for the failing health of Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster in his final film role), who also happens to be his father. John’s dealing with other issues in his family life as well, as his ex-wife serves as a thorn in his side in his relationship with his teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who is set to start college early that January on a gymnastics scholarship. Further, he’s an alcoholic in recovery, having been in AA for six years and sober for three. His fellow law enforcement officers are largely inept and lazy, pleading to let state or federal officials take on the investigation, and the only other person on the team with any real interest in stopping the killer is Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). Matters only get worse when another body pops up, this time with evidence that the victim was killed by “a wolf the size of a Kodiak bear,” and the local citizens start to wonder if there’s a werewolf in their midst. 

This is a neatly constructed little mystery, although I would have preferred if some elements of the mystery were played a little closer to the vest, or for longer. Early on, there are a lot of potential suspects for who might be the werewolf (or the serial killer, as John forcefully reiterates time and again). There’s a local dudebro (Marshall Allman) with whom PJ got into an altercation at a local watering hole over the former’s use of the f-slur; Sheriff Hadley’s medical complications may bely that his body is undergoing changes, as poor health can often be an indicator of lycanthropy in horror; the owner of the short term rental (Will Madden) is suspicious since we saw that the AirBnB had all of its knives removed at the start of the film, as if setting up a victim to have no way of defending themself; even John himself could be the “wolf,” since we see that he’s short-tempered, and lycanthropy could be used as an effective shorthand for the complete personality change that alcohol abuse brings on. Subversively, the film shows us a potential suspect whose name we never learn and only ever see from a rear or ¼ rear profile, and who mostly resembles PJ, whom we know can’t be the killer since we saw him in the shower while the first murder is committed. Later, this character dies of an overdose and, because of feasible but circumstantial evidence, the werewolf’s killings are pinned on him, but by this time we’ve seen enough of the actual killer to know that he’s still out there, even if we have yet to identify him. I was expecting the film to get a little more mileage out of the “Which characters have we met could the killer be?” a little longer, but this is still a mostly elegantly constructed mystery regardless. 

What doesn’t quite work is the way that John’s alcoholism is portrayed. After his AA self-intro that functions as his character exposition scene/thesis statement, every time that we see him afterward, he’s clearly a hothead. He pops off at the first crime scene, berates his subordinates (who, since they’re all deputies, are really his peers) at a diner, and screams at Deputy Chavez (Demetrius Daniels) at the second site where a body is discovered. We understand why he’s so stressed, but he’s not a man that’s barely holding it together in the face of tending to his ailing father while facing pressure to find a killer, and is a man who’s already experiencing outbursts of anger long before he falls off the wagon. In the midst of these pre-relapse tantrums is a sequence that actually works, when John meets his ex-wife and Jenna at a diner and the former works to elicit a promise that John will be able to be present at their daughter’s college orientation, and he remains calm and speaks directly to Jenna while clearly struggling not to lose his temper at his ex at the same time. After a second body is found, John finally digs out the beers he has stashed away in the top kitchen cupboard, but there’s very little change in the way John treats the people around him. 

Cummings has the face of a movie star from a different era; when you look like he does, you don’t have much choice but to put it up on a screen somewhere. When it comes to this particular performance, however, it remains pretty flat from start to finish, which makes it seem like he only has one setting, and that static nature of this character takes a little shine out of the movie’s luster. Where we do see some escalation from his drinking comes as he falls completely off the wagon. After collapsing on his oven door and shattering it before passing out in the detritus, there’s a scene in which Jenna comes home to find John passed out on the living room floor, and after some struggle she manages to get him upstairs and into his bed. John, completely inebriated, breaks down into barely coherent sobs about his failures while Jenna stands in the hallway begging and pleading through her own tears for her father to just go to bed, screaming that he’s scaring her. It’s harrowing, even more so than any of the murders or crime scenes we’ve witnessed. More than that, it proves that Cummings does have more than one performance style in him, and it just makes me wish that I had seen a greater degree of difference between John before and after his demons got the better of him. 

This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

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Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level. 

In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live. 

The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse. 

There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward. 

That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond