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Death Valley

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Director: Dick Richards Run Time: 87 min. Format: 35mm Rating: R Release Year: 1981

Starring: Peter Billingsley, Catherine Hicks, Paul Le Mat, Stephen McHattie, A. Willford Brimley

Spend a dog-day with The Deuce this August, sweatin’ buckets of bullets in DEATH VALLEY! Where awaits a hot-house of desert-bound stalker slasher shocks with a little leave-it-to-beaver bent to brighten the sun-baked scares and melt your mind to a muddled puddle!!

Lil’ Billy (pre-A Christmas Story Peter Billingsley!) is sad to be leaving his beloved New York Dad for a forced aforementioned Death Valley “vacation” with Mom and her new/old high-school beau that’s all butting heads and baby-ish brooding – til he blunders his way into the path of a desert death-dealing psychopath, aka: a financially strapped waiter who favors cutlery and has a penchant for peeving his prey with country and western ditties while dismantling doors and cars at a disarmingly dull deliberate pace!??! Deliriously diabolical!! Even more diabolical than the aforementioned desert death-dealing cowboy’s doings are the head-spinning veerings from Kramer vs. Kramer-istic histrionics to child-in-harm’s-way horror-troped final-girl-isms given to the likes of a toe-headed tyke! A real head-scratcher of a slasher and pre-Witness-y thriller prototype played out against the grandeur of the parched prickly-pear-ed picturesque American Southwest!! With 11-year-old Billingsley cat-and-mousing for his life against a churlish killer amongst tumblin’ tumbleweeds! Terrifying!!

And the lesson learned by those daring into DEATH VALLEY at 42nd Street’s most atrocious Anco Theatre?? Don’t go on vacations!! Don’t be deceived by the flickering lure of false oases… for there are only more dastardly dangers to be found beyond the derelict environs of the Deuce!!

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