Sumith Prasad
In Netflix’s crime drama film ‘Woman of the Hour,’ Rodney Alcala, a serial killer, takes a young girl named Amy to a gas station named Flores Gasoline after brutally raping and injuring her. The murderer then goes to the restroom, only for her to escape from him. She runs away to Last Chance Café, where she seeks refuge. The survivor calls for the police after arriving at the establishment, and the officers show up to arrest the criminal. The two sites are integral to the thriller movie’s narrative, as they appear in the background of arguably the most intense scene in the film. However, we won’t be able to visit these places in reality!
Last Chance Café is a Fictional Establishment Near San Gabriel
Last Chance Café does not exist in reality, specifically anywhere near San Gabriel, California. To shoot the climax scene of ‘Woman of the Hour,’ Anna Kendrick and her crew seemingly utilized a property on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a principal location of the crime thriller, along with Vancouver, British Columbia. The name of the café can be paralleled with Amy’s “last chance” to escape from Rodney Alcala. Considering how the serial killer brutally murders Sarah, Charlie, and Alison before meeting Amy, her fate wouldn’t have been any different if she had passed the last opportunity to run away from the rapist.
Amy is based on a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker named Monique Hoyt. As the film depicts, the teenager escaped from Rodney when the latter stopped at a gas station to go to the restroom. However, instead of a café, the survivor ran to a nearby motel. According to Stella Sands’ ‘The Dating Game Killer: The True Story of a TV Dating Show, a Violent Sociopath, and a Series of Brutal Murders,’ Hoyt screamed when she arrived at the motel, asking the people there to call the police. She also requested for their help upon adding that a man had kidnapped and raped her.
The motel guests took Hoyt to a room while one of them called 9-1-1 to report the incident. In Ian McDonald’s screenplay, the motel became a café, and its unusual name can also be a nod to Linda Lael Miller’s novel ‘The Last Chance Café.’ In the literary work, the protagonist, Hallie, arrives at the titular establishment while fleeing from a criminal, who is her ex-husband in this case. Her arrival at the café helps her open a new chapter of her life as it does with Amy, who realizes that she has saved herself from her untimely death by seeking refuge at the place.
Flores Gasoline is Rooted in Rodney Alcala’s History
Similarly, Flores Gasoline is also a fictional gas station near San Gabriel. Considering the outdated machinery at the place, the production department must have used a storefront or an open place to set up the establishment. The gas station’s presence in the scene makes it an authentic recreation of reality since Rodney Alcala did stop at a similar site while he was with Monique Hoyt. The place the serial killer stopped in real life is located somewhere near Banning in Riverside County, California, which is over seventy miles away from San Gabriel.
The reports from 1978 do not reveal the exact location of this gas station, possibly because Rodney was not arrested at the site as the crime thriller depicts. After realizing that Hoyt had escaped from him, the serial killer drove off from the place and ended up in his home. Meanwhile, the teenager was taken to a police station, where she identified him as her rapist upon seeing his photograph. The officers then showed up at his house and arrested him for raping Hoyt. Anna Kendrick’s film tweaks what happened in reality and depicts Rodney’s arrest at the gas station to ensure a dramatic conclusion to his story.
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