JOHNNY FRANK GARRET’S LAST WORD

Halloween 1981: In the small Texas town of Amarillo a nun is found raped and murdered. The prosecution under a pious but brutal lawyer quickly finds a suspect. The 17 year old weirdo Johnny Frank Garret is sentenced to death and executed in 1992. But shortly before hand, while sitting in death row, he writes a letter in which he curses everyone responsible and swears to kill them. Simon Rumley’s frenetic horror thriller is based on a true story, as portrayed in James Quackenbusch’s documentary “The Last Word”. What follows is a wildly gallop through the corrupt core of America, led by fake morals and real hate: The only member of the jury who would have found Garret not guilty, starts to connect the mysterious deaths in Amarillo with the letter. It seems as if the executed man actually came back from his grave to punish everyone responsible for his death sentence. “Johnny Frank Garret’s Last Word” shows Texas in sepia shades, while the opposing sides almost tear the film apart. Through aggressive sound-design, misleading film-editing and deliberate stylistic inconsistencies Rumley creates a peculiar beast of a movie.