A night of hell for a writer sometimes consists of complete writer’s block, no words coming out that even equal the standard that person hopes to accomplish in whatever they’re writing. Writer’s block looks mighty better than what Jonathan (Kirby Heyborne), a novelist, ends up with in one night. It starts with his nagging wife, Rebecca (Jamie Donahue) wanting a vacation somewhere, but how is he expected to work on his novel with that kind of noise?
The noise gets worse as Jonathan’s brother Artie (Jason Siner) barges into the house, desperately wanting $100,000 to pay someone back. It can get darker by way of T.J. (Gil Bernardi) whom Artie owes the money to and who defies logic completely. How in the heck did T.J. find Artie so fast? Off-screen thought dictates that perhaps T.J. followed Artie, but T.J. looks more like the guy who’d hang out at the bar watching football on a night like that. Pushing everything in as quickly as possible to get adrenaline going is the strategy here as Artie tries to reason with T.J. and T.J grabs Rebecca and heads off into the other room where the plot twists itself further. Not everything is what it seems and neither is “The Last Chapter”, which doesn’t give much to these characters beyond merely being functions of what at times looks like a script for an acting class, bowing to the wiles of Jason Siner, who obviously wanted to try out film noir in his own way, stacking up what he had seen over the years in films involving huge chunks of money, guns, and plot twists. And as it turns out, Siner looks uncomfortable with his own role, making Artie look almost cartoonishly desperate. It’s a first try that looks like many first tries, though a little higher in cinematographic quality and blood.
