Death Valley

The title could suggest a trek across the infamous Californian desert valley known as the hottest place on earth possibly set around the time of the gold rush with prospectors that goes wrong with them getting lost and then having to whatever to survive. There’s been a fair few of those sorts of films but this Death Valley doesn’t fall anywhere near. Iinstead writer and director Matthew Ninaber has gone for the tried and trusted science experiment cock-up and rescue mission.

In the opening scene see Dr Chloe (Kristen Kaster) covered in blood and being chased. Her colleague doesn’t make it and she just about gets a message out. This is picked up and a crack force of mercenaries are assembled to extract her and find out what’s going on. The two we are asked to concentrate on are Beckett (Jeremy Ninaber) and Marshall (Ethan Mitchell) who cheerfully banter their way through the film.

The team is dispatched to a location in Eastern Europe which is a heavily fortified bunker consisting of lots of tunnels and galleries. There’s a friendly force working on the ground and there are not so friendly forces equally as interested in what was going on in the bunker. What was going on won’t take the viewer long to work out neither will the dynamics of the operation once all is revealed.

As with the aforementioned lost prospectors et al in the desert there isn’t anything new here about a secret experiment going wrong and people getting whisked off to extract and combat the result.

This is blood and action for the most part with some references to the Bible and the book of Enoch presumably to add a slightly more supernatural and esoteric flavour to distinguish it from other science gone wrong films.

A good try but this is fundamentally a monster movie, and the monster itself with accompanying effects is pretty good which goes little way to make up for the familiarity of the plot and the script.

Death Valley will be available on Shudder from 9 November.