Decent 80's slasher with divorcée Sally(Catherine Hicks)and her son Billy(Peter Billingsley)meeting mom's new boyfriend, Mike(Paul Le Mat), in Arizona, touring Death Valley, running into murderous Hal(Stephen McHattie)and another accomplice along the way. With Edward Herrmann as Billy's Princeton professor father and Wilford Brimley as the sheriff of his county where the murders reside. We see how Mike has a hard time getting Billy to like him, these kinds of situations(mom's new boyfriend attempting to smooth out many uncomfortable wrinkles with his potential stepson)present those awkward complications as the older man and the difficult boy, attached so emotionally and lovingly to his real father, find some sort of common ground. This slasher derives it's suspense from the idea that a boy is in danger, a psychopath(s) knowing that Billy is the key to implicating him(them)of the serial killer murders. Most of the violence consists of the killer using a knife to slice throats(it's clearly the old knife gag where the prop distributes blood from a trigger as the one using the weapon pulls the fake blade across the victims' throats)of those he attacks from behind. Solid cast in a rather so-so little thriller, with a loud score used to unnerve the audience. McHattie really owns the film as the menace out to get little Billy. Opens as if the movie was to be a family film about the complexities of a boy adapting to a possible new man and location in his life, and then settles into it's slasher routine. Little Billy encounters a mobile home where a triple homicide took place and confiscates a necklace with a toad which he hands to the sheriff(also Hal sees little Billy with it at the restaurant for which he works)soon involving himself, inadvertently, with Hal.
Review of Death Valley
