‘Death Valley’ Review: Scares Are Alien in Shudder’s Latest
Chad Collins
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Every so often, a movie comes along that simply exists. It might sound reductive, perhaps even cruel, to discard any moniker for a new release outside of it just being a new release. But sometimes, unfortunately or not, that’s the case. Death Valley, Shudder’s latest Resident Evil riff, is a movie. It’s a movie with actors, scenes, and a monster. The monster looks to have been molded from discarded Welcome to Racoon City prosthetics. Death Valley is so beholden to templates, homage, and genre convention that, like the bioweapon at its center, it misses out on an identity of its own.
The opening scene, though not spectacular, at least shows promise. A narrow corridor, flashing lights, and an unseen creature. Chloe (Kristen Kaster) narrowly escapes the monster’s clutches. Then, in a wise bit of visual storytelling, it’s made evident that the licker, err, monster, doesn’t have eyes. Instead, it hunts by sound and smell. She broadcasts a call for help, and then, the actual movie begins.
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Everything that plays out is so painfully nondescript, which is a shame since director Matthew Ninaber, recently seen playing Psycho Goreman, should know a thing or two about conceiving a movie with singularity. The introduction to the ostensibly elite squad responding to Chloe’s distress signal could be the introduction to any movie’s elite squad. There’s Beckett (Jeremy Ninaber), the guy with a wife at home. He’s made tenuous promises that he just needs to finish this one job and then, after this one job, everything will be well. Then, of course, there’s Marshall. He’s the guy who wears a backward cap, walks with a swagger that hasn’t been cool since 2002 and remarks repeatedly how he’s a “beast in bed” without ever being asked.
The setup isn’t much better. They’re poised to raid Chloe’s compound in the remote wilderness. There are allegedly disparate, antagonistic mercenaries surrounding it, something to do with the human genome research and biowarfare being studied there. It’s something like that, keywords and conceits pulled from a Wiki guide to introductory biology. These bad guys are doing science.
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The elite squad is anything but elite. During core action sequences, often shot by simply having the leads fire rounds offscreen and then cutting to impacts, they struggle to communicate or even navigate their landscapes. Actors trip over the scenery and stumble in a way that feels less like characterization and more like polished rough cuts being passed off as final products. The slow-motion explosions– of which there are at least five in a one-minute stretch– do little to ignite excitement; only nostalgia for the days of playing soldiers with your friends in the woods. There’s no awareness of where anyone is, where the compound is, or why a monster movie even has an interminable, fifteen-minute-long shootout to begin with. It all feels like leftovers from “The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening’s” Herzegovina shoot.
The recently released Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City worked as a gangbusters B-movie because it had an identity. There were distinct characters, faithfully reconstructed settings, and a personality beneath the hordes of zombies and torn flesh. Death Valley simply has soldiers and a quasi-zombie made by mating humans with ice alien flesh. Yes, they found the creature frozen in ice. It has exposition delivered via perfectly paused cassette tapes. It has a vent crawl with plenty Jurassic Park homage without any of its artistry.
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Death Valley feels like a trailer stretched out to feature-length. The cool gore shots, occasional jolts, and sometimes compelling monster scenes can be truncated to just two minutes. The rest is padding. Padding with uneven audio mixing, arbitrary editing, and a soundtrack that thumps like every other sci-fi/horror hybrid. It’s a B-movie that’s afraid to be a bB-movie. It’s so misguided in its earnestness and efforts at appearing cool, it alienates the audience.
Death Valley premieres on Shudder Thursday, December 8.
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Death Valley
Summary
Shudder’s Death Valley is misguided in its earnestness, more committed to being nondescript than fun
