A group of twenty-somethings decide to escape the hustle and bustle of their daily lives and head out into the desert to have some fun at a wild, all-night party. At first, all is fun and games, but then the harsh light of day exposes them to the world and they are about to see the darker side of humanity.
What follows is a battle for their very lives as they tick off the wrong biker gang, who then lay siege to this secluded patch of land in an attempt to make the group pay for their indiscretions. Can you tell me what movie that sounds like? Adjust a few minor details and a similar description could be used for any number of horror films, from the A-list to the Z-list. It just so happens to describe Death Valley perfectly. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is the question.
Death Valley (originally called Mojave when it was made back on 2004) purports to be based on a true story, and I do not doubt it. However, I suspect that the details have been greatly exaggerated and possibly even fabricated. Isn't that how things tend to go? Someone reads a story, gets a glimmer of an idea, and then tries to expand it into a film. If you go by that, you could conceivably say every film was based on a true story as the writers had to get their inspiration from somewhere, right?
Anyway, this comes from a long line of true story films. As I sat there watching it, one film kept coming to mind, Wolf Creek. Now, they are not exactly the same, but they both have similarities in structure. Young people go somewhere they probably shouldn't, encounter someone, said someone terrorizes our protagonists, usually with some sort of terrible end for a few of them.
This particular day sees some friends take Josh (Eric Christian Olson) out to a rave, where they do some drugs and have a relatively good time. The next morning they discover their car has been broken into and their battery missing. With no place to go, they head off to find some local punks they spied earlier. The meeting does not go quite as planned, shots are fired, people are hurt, and before you know it, the punk returns with his gang leader and a whole mess of other punks on bikes. All you can do know is try to predict who is going to die first and take a guess at who will emerge the hero.
The problems with this film can broken down to two very important things. From a movie lover's standpoint, the characters are terribly weak. I did not have any reason to care about them, they are not developed beyond the surface level. With shallow characters there is nothing to identify with, there is no heart to latch onto, so when they start dropping like flies, I start to look forward to their deaths. From a horror lover's standpoint, there is virtually no blood and gore. There are a couple of gunshots and you see some people with blood on them, but I would not call this a gory movie at all. This is a couple of tiny cuts away from being a PG-13 affair. On both counts it loses to the similar Wolf Creek; it may be close on the character development, but Death Valley still winds up trailing.
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