Watch Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill For Free

Touches You

Sadly Over-hyped

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I'm reminded while watching Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill on the sci-fi channel something George A. Romero said recently about certain new horror directors: "They shot Faith Hill's last music video, and they think they're hot s***. Do they know how to handle it? No, they don't. Put 'em at an editing table, and they're clueless." Although Byrum Werner (maybe the coolest name for an exploitation director, I'll admit) probably hasn't done a Faith Hill video, the comparison can still apply. Werner shouldn't be directing anything remotely related to celluloid, from seeing the catastrophe that is 'Bloody Bill', as he tries to compensate for a rote and crappy script with much worse 'style'. Maybe it's a personal thing, but it's a pet peeve for me when a director uses a specific tint for a purpose that is completely ancillary, where it's more about calling attention to itself than serving any meaningful stylistic choice (Spielberg may be the only one who can get away with it). In this case, Werner uses it to the point of total madness, and not good madness: the tint is actually a lot of the time just on the *top part of the frame*, making it a foolish distraction. This goes without saying that the whole color scheme in general, whether applied by Werner himself as DP or in post, is annoying because it makes it obvious that he doesn't trust anything regarding the actual space being used, or maybe using some natural light or shadows to make atmosphere, instead of splashing on this crude red- often in a blurred vision (FOCUS! I screamed more than once). Don't even get me started on the editing in many instances, where random montage and action is cut as if by an epileptic puppy.The story itself is rote anyway: a bunch of teens riding out in the desert get car-jacked (!?) by a black guy who leads them to the ghost town of Sunset Valley, overrun by (usually) running zombies led by Bloody Bill, who has a vendetta against someone done wrong by someone and blah blah blah. Point is, a lot of this, however just totally ludicrous it all sounds (Bloody Bill's a confederate- no Yankees or blacks after all), could just be moot if it was at least a halfway decently acted or technically executed effort. It's not, at all.Watching Death Valley is like getting a checklist for things that could possibly go wrong for a movie and do, over and over again. The music is fourth-rate metal garbage on loan from the boys who've been practicing in the garage next-door; the "performances" are from nobodys (Gregory Bastian goes to lengths to be a bad-ass mutha, but is one of the most ineffectual I've seen in recent memory), this including Bloody Bill's 'actor' who is barely on screen at all; the gore and violence is directed amateurishly, with tomato-sauce blood and eye-liner used for added "effect" during the transformation from living to dead; even the production design, with the sign changing from time to time from 99 to 107 from start to finish is cheesy in an unforgivable way.It works only up to a completely ironic point; make sure you've got the right friends and good booze lying around and it should make for a chummy Saturday night movie. But good lord, don't go into it expecting any semblance of an entertaining B-horror movie. It's drek of the shlockiest order, and I'd have to be paid more than the actors themselves were (if they were that is) to sit through it again.

Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill starts as five college kids, Gwen (Chelsea Jean), Mandy (Denise Boutte), Sondra (Kandis Erickson), Jerry (Matt Marraccini) & Buck (Steve Glinn) plus they're teacher Avery (Scott Carson) set off across country to Phoenix. En-route they are taken hostage by a drug dealer named Earl (Gregory Bastien) who is looking for his fellow drug dealer Darrel (Dean N. Arevalo) whom he thinks has ripped him off. They find Darrel's car & follow the road to a old town called Sunset Valley where they find Darrel injured & covered in blood, he warns them to leave but before they can they are all attacked by a horde of flesh eating zombies lead by evil Confederate soldier William Anderson AKA Bloody Bill (Jeremy Bouvet) who has placed a curse on the town & it's residents for his & his sister's executions centuries ago. It's either the flesh eating zombies or the kids & it's a fight to the death...Photographed & directed by Byron Werner I thought Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill was an OK low budget zombie film. The script moves along at a fair pace & entertains on a basic level. It isn't anywhere near the likes of Night of the Living dead (1968) or Dawn of the Dead (1978) in terms of quality but it does it's best. The character's are the typical bunch of stranded would-be victims as they eventually start to argue & bicker at each other as the situation becomes ever worse & their number begins to dwindle. Of course you don't really go into a film such as this expecting high art or a meaningful story which is just as well because this definitely isn't high art & certainly doesn't have a meaningful story. Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill is one of those films that if you turn your brain off, can ignore a few rough edges & don't set your expectations too high can be enjoyed in a dumb mindless sort of way. It ain't exactly brilliant but it ain't too bad either.Director Werner tries all the flashy & somewhat annoying editing tricks there is, bleached colours, slow-mo, fast-mo, frame skipping & quick cuts. The special effects aren't that great but I've seen worse, there's no real scares, tension or atmosphere probably because it's set entirely during the day which doesn't help the ambiance, does it? One aspect of Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill that I hated was the music, it was absolutely awful & there were times that I pressed mute on my TV remote control because it was giving me a headache. There is also a stupid bit with a grenade, I mean that grenade would have done more damage than cause a bit of smoke, I mean it was a wooden house it would have set in on fire at least, wouldn't it? The gore is tame & lacking, there's a couple of flesh eating scenes, there's a decapitated zombie head & a few gun shot wounds, I was pretty disappointed with the gore levels here to be honest.Technically Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill is OK, it's nothing special but considering the low budget it could have been worse. It looks like it was shot on a digital camcorder like a lot of low budget horror films are these days, personally I really don't like how these digitally shot films look & I much prefer proper good old fashioned film. The acting sucked, but then what did you expect?Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill is an average low budget horror film that isn't exactly spectacular but it's sort of watchable in it's own crap way, I doubt I'll ever want to see it again though. Worth a watch if your bored & have lots (& I mean lots) of love for the horror genre.

I think people are sleeping on this movie, because I think it will be a cult classic. This movie is a comedy and a horror and the same time, Youn can't help but laugh at some of the parts in the movie. Especially when earl is bit by a zombie and decides to go out like a soldier. The only thing I wish to see is more of is gore. The girl getting her face ate wasn't enough for me. The zombies should had pin her down and ate her eyes, and ate the flesh off her face until you seen nothing but her bones. When I home sitting back and relaxing,I like to keep rewinding the part of earl making a complete fool of bloody bill's zombies. I don't take points off the movie because of the graphics. I think the people who don't like that should support movies like that, so that next time the film company will have enough money to make a movie with better graphics

Bloody Bill (pardon me if I drop the rest of the ludicrously long title) is pretty good fun. The cast are enjoyably OTT, the premise is utterly ridiculous and there's zombies present in vast numbers. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and some effort has obviously been made to give it some original touches, whether cosmetic or within the storyline. In its field, it's pretty impressive.That said, it's field is straight-to-video horror, where the field varies from the 'really should have been in the theatre but wasn't' titles like Madhouse and Ginger Snaps right down to the 'if I'd paid more than rental for that I would have gone Mr T on somebody' output like Death Tunnel and Killjoy. Rest assured, Bloody Bill is thankfully in the top quarter of that spectrum, largely thanks to a dose of warped humour and the sheer volume of zombies it spits out, but it has some holes in it's jacket.Firstly, the storyline is borderline stupidity. A college debate team (yes, I said DEBATE TEAM) are carjacked by a young black guy (*cough* cliché *cough*) who drives them out to where he was meant to pick up his partner, who it turns out has been assimilated somehow into the zombie army of Bloody Bill, an undead confederate raider who's sworn vengeance on humanity. I'll give you a second while you regain your composure after the inevitable laughing fit. You will need your best suspension of disbelief hat on for this one, and possibly the matching underwear to go with it.Ignoring the stupidity of the plot (which actually it has to be said, is so stupid, it's amazing) the acting is not awful but not great either. The main characters, aforementioned young black guy aside (who steals the show with his catchphrase 'man, that ain't right!' and other scenes of daring-do) are either so annoying or so ineffectual that within split seconds of their mouth opening you're praying for a zombie attack to start up so you don't have to listen to them. The lead in particular is nails-down-chalkboard annoying, refusing to believe anything bad is happening seemingly until 50 minutes in, obviously going for the Scully dollar, even saying 'there has to be a rational explanation for this' several times throughout.Still, where it counts, on the zombie front, Bloody Bill delivers in spades, with an impressive 20-30 zombies on screen at once, charging about and causing lots of mayhem. Bloody Bill himself is cool, a little like John Carl Buechler's Forty-Niner but more decomposed and not quite such a bad-ass. Also, the movie is spiced up with some great moments of bad-taste humour and some pretty sick gore effects.As horror goes, Bloody Bill is a solid success, not exactly a film that'll blow you away, but unpretentious fun all the same, and worth a rent or a cheap buy if you see it somewhere.