my very brief thoughts on.... 'Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill'

I love watching bad movies. I especially love watching them with friends. Sometimes that's not an option, so I get stuck watching them alone.... like with this movie. And kids, this is NOT a good movie. I had no allusions that this was going to be a masterpiece of modern horror, I knew exactly what I was getting into. What I didn't realize was exactly how crummy this would be. The thing is, this could have had the potential to be kind of epic. When I first started watching it, I didn't realize that it had zombies in it. I thought it was just a lame ghost story about a confederate soldier from the past who has come back as a ghost to kill folks. The zombies were such a welcome surprise! The first, like, 20 minutes or so were pretty keen.... I was tied into the story and ready to enjoy, then things started going south. It just got worse and worse until I just didn't care about it anymore. I am not even sure I could spoil the ending for you, even if I wanted to, as I don't remember what in the heck happened! (And I'm not watching it again to find out.) If you really want to know what happened at the end, you're welcome to watch it on your own.... it's OnDemand from Netflix right now. Go ahead, I'll wait. Moving on....

Here is the plot according to http://wwww.Netflix.com: "While traveling to a competition, a college debate team is abducted by a drug dealer who takes them to an abandoned town, which they quickly discover is the grave site of Bloody Bill Andersen, a Confederate soldier from the Civil War. Soon, the students are cornered by the town's locals -- all of whom are zombies led by the undead Bloody Bill himself. Can the students stop their infighting long enough to band together and escape the town alive?" That sums it up and yes, I didn't read this before I watched it. I just saw the cover art for the DVD and the star ratings and jumped right in without thinking. Ah well....

One of the neat things about this movie that I learned as soon as I started watching it was that the writers of it are Matt and John Yuan. You may remember them as two of the mall cops, Matt and John Yuen, in 'Observe and Report' with Seth Rogen. Because of this, I felt inclined to cut the movie a bit of slack in the end. So, strong opening plus cool writers equals 1 out of 5 stars. I am betting dollars to doughnuts that if I watched this with the right people and the right snacks, I would probably own it tomorrow. Other than that, it really doesn't have that much more going for it. I'm guessing that we haven't seen the end of the movies being written by these guys. If this was just an early attempt by them, I'm actually kind of excited to see what comes next!

Isn't it strange that a movie that you disliked so much can get backhanded compliments about it as much as straitforward criticism? That is what makes watching movies so much fun. This is one reason why I recommend that you always consider watching something no matter how good or bad it looks, you just never know. Granted, you may have to submit yourselves to some horrific crap at times.... but then again, you may find a little diamond in the rough. Someone out there spent a lot of time and money to put together any movie that you see. They didn't just appear out of nowhere. Because of that logic, I always assume that there must be some grain of goodness in just about any movie. If people were prejudice about movies than whose to say if 'Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn' would have ever become the cult icon that it is today? So the next time you're browsing Netflix or the aisles at your local DVD or Blu-ray retailer, consider the underdog.... you may just find a new favorite movie to watch or a new DVD to shove under that one annoying wobbly leg of your desk. Am I right or am I right?

NOTE TO READER: This movie has gone under several different titles, at the time of this trailer it was not yet finalized.