Death Valley review – gross-out monster mayhem creature feature

Oscars are probably not on the cards, but this is a decently mounted creature feature by Canadian director Matthew Ninaber, which has enough mucus-coated hijinks to make it worth 90 post-pub minutes. A team of mercenaries are airlifted into the country of “Bosvania” to storm a bioresearch compound and rescue a scientist who appears to be the sole remaining staff member. Nice guy Beckett (Jeremy Ninaber) and trash-talking sniper Marshall (Ethan Mitchell) are on Bravo squad, tasked with shielding Alpha from a unit of local militia in the surrounding woods. But “shit” goes south, and the pair are forced to take refuge inside, where something has been painting the walls a nice shade of scarlet.

Some weedy-looking airstrikes aside, Death Valley wears its low budget well, with the forest firefights impressively punchy and – a bonus in action scenes these days – keeping a good sense of spatial awareness. Ninaber also handles the subsequent bunker crawl briskly: the duo locate stricken boffin Chloe (Kristen Kaster), navigate corridors with the flickering lighting standard in failing facilities, and tiptoe around her infected colleagues and a head monster that is like a Lord of the Rings orc wearing its brains on the outside.

Copied near-wholesale from the Alien handbook, this can’t muster that classic’s sense of remorseless encroaching terror. But Ninaber threads this critterwalk with just enough morsels of story (some hokum about the monster being the biblical Nephilim) both to keep our curiosity burning and justify making Kaster’s character what initially appears to be just another box-ticking kickass lady. The special ops pair’s banter, with Mitchell relishing his line in cheerful sarcasm, is another light in the darkness. Death Valley is never fully disturbing, but enjoyably gross is good enough.