Main cast: Jeremy Ninaber (James Beckett), Ethan Mitchell (Marshall), Kristen Kaster (Chloe), Matt Daciw (Olek Voikov), Jacqueline Ninaber (Rachel), and Jonah Fortin (Jonah Petrov)
Director: Matthew Ninaber
Death Valley is a film that, in the old days, would be gathering dust in a video rental store display case, while today it is the perfect cheap fodder for a streaming service. The poster is impressive, which is why I am lured into watching this thing, and yikes. I think most of the budget of this movie went to the monster and the poster.
Matthew Ninaber is the actor behind the latex of Psycho Goreman, and the same fellow Andy Garrett did the special effects for that film and this one, so I have some good feelings while sitting down and watching the opening credits.
Well, what do I know, as the thing quickly devolves into a familiar premise: an experiment in a lab goes wrong, and Dr Chloe sends an SOS while claiming that she has in her possession a special super-amazing sample of DNA that gives people a reason to want to save her. Here is where James Beckett and Marshall come in. They are mercenaries paid to bring Chloe out within 24 hours. Watch out, though, there’s a monster in the lab, and Russian agents want what Chloe has too.
The best way to describe this thing is that Mr Ninaber, who is also the screenwriter, was hoping to mate Resident Evil and Alien in order to get some semi-respectable knockoff, but the result is more of a bland and uninteresting film that is too dull to be good and too nondescript to be bad in a memorable manner. No, really, the greatest ambition of this movie is to be a Resident Evil knockoff, to the point that Jeremy Ninaber is made to look like Leon S Kennedy from the video games, and I find such ambition to be kind of sad, honestly.
A big reason for this is the predominantly wooden cast that utter their lines like they are auditioning to be the new voice for Siri. Ethan Mitchell is the only one that seems halfway awake in this show, and tragically for everyone, he is paired off with Jeremy Ninaber, who is doing his best here to display as little human emotion as possible. The scary thing here is that I don’t think this Mr Ninaber is acting as much as he’s just a limited actor in this respect.
The plot development follows a predictable route, and even the main characters’ background story are clichéd. So, there’s not much excitement to be had in that area.
Furthermore, the whole thing is presented like a video game, with the two heroes even getting their instructions on a device in a scene designed to resemble a video game mission screen as much as possible. However, the limited budget means that the lighting in this movie is constantly too bright or too dark, with little in-between. This means that the movie doesn’t succeed in generating a frightening atmosphere. Also, with everything being so bright, the cheapness as well as falseness of the sets and props only become more evident.
Perhaps because of the limited budget, the monster is hardly present. Instead, the movie tries to offer distractions such as people crawling in dirty tunnels, running along corridors filling up with ridiculously bright gases, pointlessly slow motion action scenes, and hilariously fake and puny-looking explosions. So yes, the best special effect is the monster, and it is hardly in the movie, so there goes any reason to be excited about this thing.
Death Valley is too big a scope, even for a knockoff of better films, for the budget it had. This one needs better action scenes, better scary lighting, better cast, better… everything, basically. In other words, the people involved in this baby should have raised more funds, maybe by selling more drugs or having OnlyFans cheap sales or something, before they started working on it. In its final form, this whole thing is a testament to how, sometimes, when the money ain’t there, it’s better to scale down the script even more or just poop out something and get paid by a streaming service.
Oh wait, the latter is just what they did and god damn it.
