An ingenious action-packed horror that audiences utterly detested fights for streaming survival

If you’ve got a soft spot for bullet-riddled action movies, blood-drenched horrors, and are the sort of person who pays attention to what the critics think, then you’d be well within your rights to consider taking the plunge and checking out last year’s Death Valley.

After all, co-writer and director Matthew Ninaber’s gory shoot ’em up holds a strong 75 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the premise that finds a team of mercenaries attempting to rescue a bioengineer being held captive in a Cold War bunker – only to fall foul of the dangerous, deadly, and terrifying creature that lurks within – offers plenty of Predator meets Aliens vibes.

However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Reviews from the critical side of the equation may have been strong, but audiences utterly detest the film. How much do they hate it, you may be wondering? Well, Death Valley currently boasts a despicable five percent user average on the aggregation site, which is far from encouraging.

The filmmakers should at least win bonus points to ingenuity, though, with the pandemic forcing the creative team to build the entirety of the bunker in Ninaber’s back yard and reuse the same walls over and over as necessary, with his kids even getting in on the act by helping paint them – while a heavy rainstorm affecting the director’s property was also worked into the narrative.

There might be a massive discrepancy on the merits of Death Valley, then, but one thing that can’t be denied is that it’s roaring up the streaming charts. Per FlixPatrol, the polarizing creature feature has become a Top 10 hit on Prime Video in multiple countries around the world, but we’ll just need to wait and see if those Rotten Tomatoes scores go up or down.