Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill (2004)
Starring Chelsea Jean, Jeremy Bouvet, Gregory Bastien, Denise Boutte & Matt Marraccini
Directed by Byron Werner
Written by John Yuan & Matt Yuan
Ladies and gentlescum, welcome back to another fine installment of Mondo Cheapo: It Came From The Bottom Of The Bargain Bin, the monthly BthroughZ column in which I, your humble and horrible host, take you on a strange journey into the cheapskate heart of dumpster-damned genre movie curios. I, William Weird, have set out on a quest to the furthest reaches of America's garage sales, discount outlets, and going-out-of-business blow-outs. Armed with only my wits and my will, I send myself spelunking down, deep, deeper, deepest, into the dark abyss of clearance racks and delete bins... so you don't have to.
Sometimes, when you're diggin' through these cinema cemeteries, you strike gold and find something so brilliant (even if only brilliant because of the sheer badness of it all) that it is quite plainly a veritable crime against celluloid for said particular chunk of forgotten motion picture goodness to be sentenced to an unloved life collecting dust n' scorn besides used copies of S.W.A.T. and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 5. Other times, though, you'll find there's a damn good reason why society has deemed certain slices of cinematic crapola as unsuitable for anyone, save the hardiest and/or cheapest souls, to ever lay eyes on. Some movies, dear friends, are better left buried.
DEATH VALLEY: THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL is such a film. Not only should this sucker have stayed buried, it should've been buried even deeper.
I found this snoozefest at a local dollar store. Truth be told, it ain't even worth the four quarters I paid for it. See, when I picked this stinker up, I unfortunately missed the fact that it was made by The Asylum, the notorious "mockbuster" factory known for coughing up such lawsuit-bait offerings as TRANSMORPHERS, WHEN A KILLER CALLS, and DEATH RACERS (::groan::). Although DEATH VALLEY isn't actually a product of said company's infamous modus operandi of latching onto big budget Hollywood releases and defecating into the renting world their own hastily produced, similarly titled rip-offs in response, this flick is nevertheless just as bad and unwatchable as any one of The Asylum's D.T.V. counterfeits. I'd no sooner recommend watching THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL than I would HALLOWEEN NIGHT or THE TERMINATORS. Though I must admit that The Asylum's bizarre approach to filmmaking (or, rather, film marketing) does indeed amuse me, I must also admit that, nine out of ten times, I'd be hesitant to wish these pictures on even my worst of enemies.
The plot of this bad boy bubby was so by-the-book that it almost isn't even worth me taking the time to type these words. Group of teenagers wandered into small, sparsely populated, creepy Southern town. Group of teenagers encountered creepy local legend and creepy undead townsfolk. People started to die, creepily. In the end, a bored screenwriter collected a paycheck, then contemplated hanging himself in the closet, David Carradine-style. DEATH VALLEY's storyline was all just one, big, overdone cliché, but that doesn't necessarily have to equal lameness, if placed in the hands of talented individuals. What we have here, however, sure ain't talented individuals. That's for damn sure.
Alright, if you want me to get a tad more specific describing the plot, I will. A dopey band of white suburbanite community college debate club dullards set out in their car (with a lone "token black chick" character tacked on and shoved into the back seat) on the road to some big debate-off. Or some such shit. On the way, these characters (all of whom are just as flimsy as the storyline they're stuck in) got kidnapped by an uzi-waving black guy on a mission to hunt down his missing latino coke-dealer amigo, who had cheated him out of some prime cashy-money. Or some such shit. Eventually, this ragtag collection of one-dimensional stereotypes wandered into the middle-of-nowhere ghost town known as "Sunset Valley," which, as it turns out, was home to a small army of "fast zombies" (ugh) led by the reanimated corpse of Civil War legend "Bloody" Bill Something-I-Don't-Care-Enough-About-To-Bother-Looking-Up (for the record, this guy was based on a real figure from U.S. history, something I'm sure the man's ancestors appreciated a whole lot).
Also, I almost forgot to mention... these zombies weren't just any ol' zombies. No sir. They were even more eeeeevil than that. What's more evil than zombies, you ask? Racist zombies, of course. That's right, boyo, these deadites didn't just hate the living, they also hated Yankees and black people. Hoo-doggy!
Mind you, this murky, muddy mess sounds much, much better than it really was. Which is depressing, considering it doesn't really sound all that great to begin with. ::sigh::
There's so much wrong with this flick I'm not even sure where to begin. It makes you wonder if the inmates of The Asylum have any idea about what they hell they're doing whatsoever. Imagine a mix of 2000 MANIACS, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and Zack Snyder's accursed DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, with a villain who looks like a Halloween costume store knock-off of Bubba Ho-Tep. Now imagine taking any and all entertainment value that might be mined from the above description, and flushing it right down the crapper. I often found myself feeling as though I were sitting through some uninteresting, joyless, alternate universe version of DEAD & BREAKFAST. For the record, you're much better off watching DEAD & BREAKFAST than sitting through the mass brain cell genocide (and I mean that in a bad way) that is THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL.
First of all, DEATH VALLEY was home to one of the most obnoxious and teeth-gratingly, ear-rapingly godawful soundtracks I've heard. Most of it sounded like a shitty, lame-ass attempt to clone Rammstein. The herky-jerky camera moves (an obvious attempt to both give the movie some kind of trite "edgy" visual style and to hide the filmmaker's own technical ineptitude) were distracting at best and painfully irritating at worst. No attempts were made to make any of the zombies look remotely worth-a-crap outside of Bloody Bill himself. Most were just spritzed with some fake blood and sent on their merry way. It's additionally notable that many of the gutmunchers wore clothes that were tattered n' shredded in the same manner you might see with an eleven year-old trick-or-treater's werewolf get-up. Most agonizingly, act three dragged on way longer than it had any right to (seriously, that final third made me want to immolate my genitalia by embedding a Fourth Of July sparkler up my urethra). And don't even ask for any continuity, consistency, or logic (why does the black guy have a grenade?!?). You won't get it.
Oh, and did I mention all those running zombies. Arg!!! Seriously, fast zombies suck. Who's with me on this?
As if shoving more "fast zombies" down our collective throats wasn't bad enough, apparently the Asylum bigwigs thought it'd be pertinent to make matters worse by giving many of those same nimble ghoulies a repertoire of tragically bad Southern accents. Yikes.
On top of all that, I was kinda disturbed by the fact that all the minority characters were also the most inhospitable, shallow, criminal characters in the film. The uzi-waving, hostage-taking, coke-snorting drug dealer redeems himself a skosh at the very end, but that doesn't ever change the fact that he's still... an uzi-waving, hostage-taking, coke-snorting drug dealer. A little piece of advice for The Asylum: if you're going to make the questionable decision to deal with racial themes in your piss-poor, nickel-and-dime, Sci-Fi Channel fodder cowboy/zombie splatter flick, and even go so far as to throw bigoted flesheaters and ill-advised uses of the n-word into the mix, you might want to attempt some modicum of balance by not having all the non-white members of the cast be portrayed as unlikable douche bags. Admittedly, all the characters here were unlikable douche bags, but it's pretty clear that the black guy, the black girl, and the latino dude were the characters who were intended to be unlikable douche bags. Smooth move, Asylum. Smooooth move.
All in all, DEATH VALLEY: THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL was a crazyquilt juggernaut of crap movie-making that combined every filmic failure you can think of into a single, sad-faced celebration of suckiness. The direction was terrible. The acting was terrible. The writing was terrible. The script, the dialogue, the idea, the pacing. Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. Sometimes mundane or mediocre, though usually not even good enough to be classified as either. The music, the wardrobe, production design, props, special effects, audio, editing. Everything, really. Everything about this movie... sucked.
Still, all that wouldn't be quite so bad if the final product hadn't been just so damned forgettable.
Some movies, you might say, are "not memorable." DEATH VALLEY seems to have been custom-made to induce amnesia.
The problem with DEATH VALLEY wasn't that it was appallingly bad per se, but that it was simply bland to a nearly criminal degree. To my mind, the greatest sin any film can commit is not to be bad, but to be boring. And DEATH VALLEY was definitely boring. Big time. The worst part, you know, was that the movie, in truth, could've been saved if only a teensy weensy little bit more effort had been put into it! With just a few tweaks to the script, a minimal amount of extra dollars thrown to the special effects department, and maybe a spoonful of humor dropped into the otherwise way-too-serious proceedings, THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL could've at least stood out as being worth, if nothing else, a one-time-only rental. But, as things currently stand, DEATH VALLEY asks you to sacrifice both your time and money while offering a fat wad of nothing in return.
Granted, it doesn't give you anything to really, truly get angry about, or anything to hate. It barely even gives you any reason to complain. But it gives you virtually no reasons to smile or feel anything even resembling satisfaction either. It does absolutely nothing, inviting only apathy, as likely to warrant some kind of sincere passionate response, either positive or negative, as a lump of mud clinging to the side of a log. At least if it was a lump of shit you might hold your nose and curl you lip up in a snarl of disgust. But there is no genuine disgust or contempt or vile, vehement loathing to be felt here. There is only mind-numbing boredom. This flick isn't even worthy of the ol' M.S.T.3.K. treatment. Ultimately, the problem with DEATH VALLEY: THE REVENGE OF BLOODY BILL is that it's just... empty. Watching it will only make an hour and a half of your day empty as well. Worst of all, it'll probably make you feel empty.
Avoid this hollow wreck at all costs. You're better off using the D.V.D. as a makeshift frisbee. Trust me.
Until next slime...
Stay sick!
Your pickled pal,
William Weird.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 debate club members whose logical argument skills leave much to be desired
Recommendation: ignore it
Best moment: black guy wears whiteface while whackin' ghouls in a too-brief binge of bullet-blazing kung-fu carnage
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william