In short: Death Valley (1982)

As if going through his parents’ divorce and now making a tour through Arizona and particularly Death Valley with his mother (Catherine Hicks) and her new/old boyfriend who likes to pretend he’s a modern cowboy played by Joe Don Baker even though he’s hawking real estate and played by Paul Le Mat weren’t enough to trouble a little boy, little Billy (Peter Billingsley) stumbles into a caravan that’s actually the scene of a murder. Neither Billy nor the grown-ups realize it at the time, mind you, and just when they encounter the same caravan as a wreck surrounded by police by the side of the road, do they realize something was very wrong.

Billy took a medallion from the caravan, and wouldn’t you believe it, the nice waiter (Stephen McHattie) in their hotel is wearing one just like it! Billy is a clever little boy, so he gives the thing to the local sheriff (the Wilford Brimley); unfortunately not before the nice waiter has seen is too. For reasons best known to himself, after dispatching the sheriff and, as you do, stowing his corpse in a cupboard, the killer waiter now begins to stalk Billy and his family with murderous intent.

Death Valley’s director Dick Richards started his career as an ad director, and watching the film, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. The film’s visual style is certainly slick, and the plot goes through all of the expected motions of a film neither quite a thriller nor a pure slasher with perfect competence. However, there’s a certain lack of depth that makes it easy to fall back onto the old cliché of ad directors not tending to make very brainy films. And not just because it telegraphs its supposed plot twist early on in the scene when Brimley gets offed.

It’s one of those films that really doesn’t do anything that’s wrong, but it also doesn’t much that’s right, and certainly little that’s interesting. Quite a few scenes here should by all rights be real suspenseful nail biters but there’s an emotional distance to the film that makes it very difficult to become very excited by much what’s happening in it. You know you are supposed to be on the edge of your seat, but the film never puts in the effort to actually drag you there.

The whole affair doesn’t become more interesting once you have copped to the fact that the whole subplot about new boyfriend trying to prove himself to Billy has all the psychological sophistication of a very special episode of a contemporary TV show. On the plus side, Stephen McHattie could be pretty creepy without the script he’s working from actually providing much help even this early in his career, and Peter Billingsley was a great precocious kid performer.


It’s just all a bit too riskless and harmless to grab me.

Term Life (2016)

Nick Barrow (Vince Vaughan) works as a planner for all sorts of heists, though he doesn’t involve himself in crimes where people get killed or actually hurt. His last plan for stealing quite a bit of money being held as evidence doesn’t work out terribly well, though. Someone murders the group that were his clients, which makes the father of their leader rather unhappy. Unfortunately, Viktor (Jordi Mollà), as the man is called, is a big Mexican cartel boss, so he’s bound to seek someone – like a certain planner he just might suspect to have sold his plan to two groups at the same time – to blame for the death of his son and do nasty things to him.

The first little talk between Viktor and Nick ends with the cartel boss leaving Nick in the hands of his goons to go and fetch Nick’s estranged teenage daughter Cate (Hailee Steinfeld) as a tool of persuasion. Fortunately, Nick escapes and grabs a rather unwilling Cate before Viktor can get his hands on her and goes on the lam with her. It’s really a rather awkward way for a father and a daughter to reconnect, particularly since Nick’s actual plan right now isn’t to find a way to get Viktor off his back so much than it is to keep Cate and himself alive until a freshly signed life insurance policy comes into effect and Nick can die with a good conscience.

Exacerbating the problem of survival is the fact that the people who actually killed Viktor’s son and his gang, a group of corrupt policemen lead by Joe Keenan (Bill Paxton), are on Nick’s and Cate’s trail too; and let’s not even speak of the father-daughter trouble ahead.

Peter Billingsley’s crime thriller and father-daughter (sort of) road movie Term Life certainly is not an original film: it’s full of well-worn character types going through well-worn plot points until things finish on a bit too much of a happy end. It is, however, also a well-directed film chock full of fine actors breathing life into their stock characters. There are not just Vince Vaughn and professional teenager (who is actually really good at playing this sort of role while feeling real and not becoming annoying) Hailee Steinfeld. This is the sort of film that can cast Annabeth Gish for what amounts to a single shot of a telephone conversation with Steinfeld, just happens to include guys like Shea Whigham or Mike Epps among Bill Paxton’s gang, and adds Jonathan Banks and Terrence Howard for supporting roles. Basically, it’s a bit of a dream cast for this sort of thing, and elevates what could be a film going through the motions into something at least much more lively.

When there’s action, Billingsley does stage it well, if not spectacularly; I couldn’t shake the feeling spectacle wasn’t really in the budget.

Billingsley does have a nice, straightforward directing style that works well when it comes to supporting actors doing their thing, and isn’t interesting in wowing the audience with style. Rather, it’s the kind of direction that puts itself in the service of characters and plot and prepares room for them to breathe. Which is just the right sort of approach for this sort of film, if you ask me.


The script might not be original but it features quite a few good scenes and no bad ones (which makes it a good film in a Howard Hawks sense as well as in my book) with particularly the father-daughter conflict feeling believable enough to make me root for the two to patch things up and survive. In general, most scenes here have a moment, a line or a dialogue exchange that feel more real, more interesting, or just more alive than usual in this particular sub-genre. It’s not enough to start mumbling about this being a future classic but most certainly enough to turn Term Life into a satisfying genre film that puts more effort in than it strictly needs to.