Who payed the critics

A lot of fun.

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

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The Asylum has released yet another winner, and by winner I mean a piece of crap that should have never seen the light of day unless it were featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3,000. This movie was so painful that I had to watch it in four separate sittings and still suffered all the way through it. Don't see it.The poorly placed music in this film alone was enough to completely ruin it but horrible acting, a terrible storyline and no scares all had pivotal roles as well. The only things about this movie that make me not give it a 1 are the okay effects and the bad guy looks decent, but they did show him way too much. I really wish The Asylum would stop making movies.If you like well done, well written horror film, resist with every inch of your being. You'll be thankful that you did.

A group of teens (on their way to a debating competition) are taken hostage by a drug dealer who is looking for his partner in crime. They are forced to drive to the dilapidated ghost-town of Sunset Valley. Here they are attacked by a load of zombies, led by the evil Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier seeking revenge for the deaths of himself and his sister.Byron Werner, the 'director' of this crap-fest, has definitely got ideas above his station. Instead of accepting that he's helming a low budget horror film, he goes all 'Tony Scott' on us and uses annoying directorial and editing techniques to excess: bleached out film stock, staccato editing, wobbly camera-work, coloured filters. This isn't art, Byron... neither is it a music video... it's schlock horror, so cut out the pretentious film-making and start off by learning how to tell a story!The plot is a weak derivative mixture of elements from H.G. Lewis' 2000 Maniacs and Romero's Night of the Living Dead, without an ounce of the charm of either of these classics. The annoying teens are portrayed by a talentless bunch of nobodies and they deliver their lines as though reading off a board. The awful script is clichéd drivel, with dreadful dialogue and absolutely no logic. Hell, it even has the teens debating with each other whilst under attack from the living dead!The 'special effects' are also lousy; the zombie makeup is extremely amateurish and the gore content is fairly low. Even the zombie extras are bad: they shuffle in a variety of unconvincing manners—some fast, some slow, and, I'm convinced, some with grins on their faces.I'm a great fan of zombie films and usually cut even the worst efforts some slack if they deliver ample blood 'n' guts, but Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill fails even with this simple task and receives the lowest possible rating from me.

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.

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.