Death Valley (also known as Mojave) follows four young men - Josh (Eric Christian Olsen), Daniel (Rider Strong), Anthony (Bumper Robinson) and Brick (Wayne Young) - who get tired of their every day inner city existence and decide to leave Los Angeles for a while to check out a crazy rave party being held out in the middle of the desert. They meet up with a hot chick named (Genevieve Cortese) Amber and things are looking like they're going to be a whole lot of fun. The guys hoping for healthy doses of sex, drugs and obnoxious music but they soon learn that they've wandered onto some very dangerous turf! You see, the part of the desert they've wound up in is actually controlled by a gang of homicidal biker trash lead by a tough, machete wielding nut job named Dom (Dash Mihok) and these guys are none too happy to see a bunch of punk kids moving in on their territory.

The Scorpions turn out to be a pretty serious problem and they start playing head games with the group who soon find themselves in some very serious danger. While initially they think the threat will pass, they soon learn that these bikers are not going to let them off. When the bikers make it clear that they're going to kill the group, Josh finds himself having to make some very difficult choices in what turns into a fairly grim tale of survival.

Supposedly based on true event, Death Valley may borrow heavily from films like The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance but manages to carve out its own unique story in spite of the fact that the movie wears its influences on its sleeve. If you can sit through the painfully dull first half of the film, you wind up with a tense little thriller that contains some solid stunt work, reasonably good acting, decent effects work and interesting twists. It's unfortunate that the poor pacing of the first act hurts the film as much as it does, however.

While the heroes are all well portrayed by their respective cast members, the real start of the show is Dash Mihok as Dom, the leader of The Scorpions. Without going over the top he manages to bring a nice sense of manic maliciousness to the character that actually makes him a genuinely intimidating antagonist. It's also refreshing to see the protagonists actually act with intelligence rather to walk right into the bad guys' hands as is the norm in films like this.

Despite the aforementioned pacing issue, Death Valley is worth a look. It's a low budget picture but it makes the most out of its desert locations and its cast and even the score gets a little obvious at times, at least the good outweighs the bad.

Video:

Death Valley arrives on DVD in an anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen transfer. While it's nice to see the transfer properly flagged for progressive scan, there are some issues here, particularly with mpeg compression artifacts. There's a coat of grain over top of the image and some mild print damage evident throughout. Many of the nighttime scenes are too dark and often the colors look flat and washed out.