Is “Stranded in a Desert Movie” a genre? It Might be. If it is, this one falls squarely into that. Normally you just have a person or two being stupid and getting trapped in a remote location, this one does an adequate job doing it with an extended family and their dogs getting snapped up in the trap. While Craven’s first outing The Last House on the Left gets a bit too sadistic for my taste, this one scales it back. A little. It’s still a lot like that though, but a bit more competently done. In the desert.
An large family is making their way to California but take a little detour off the beaten path to visit an old silver mine with some family history. Unfortunately for them, it’s a little TOO off the beaten path. Some bad map-readings and a fuckin rabbit then puts them into the shit. It gets...abnormally intense. For clarification, Not mutant bunny intense, but another kind of intense. Damn you, Night of the LepusNight of the Lepus! Now I imagine a mutant bunny under every bed! Damn you!
While the antagonist part of the plot is a bit cheese, it still sets it up okay, so I’m giving this some leeway. Craven did a good job playing out the premise (mostly) as realistic as possible with the reactions to the unimaginable, with doing a mostly adequate job of setting up a larger cast of characters with their own personalities to keep them from being too generic. Plus he does let the story play out from both perspectives while still keeping the tension. Would it have been better casting David Hess? Yes. But posterboy Michael Berryman is a good face to the story, and does a damn fine job with it even in his somewhat secondary role to temu Oliver Reed, and without having to resort to somewhat sketchy prosthetics like his feral brethren. And a nice early role by Dee Wallace. Weird she pops up in two movies this month, with The Howling. But I guess the scream queens earn their roles for a reason. For a desert terror movie that doesn’t involve giant radioactive monsters, this one isn’t bad.
