Death Valley

An achingly average low-rent slasher. Noisome kid (Billingsley), on vacation in Arizona with his mom and her new boyfriend to establish the seeds of familial love, stumbles across a clue to what appears to be a novel way of (literally) cutting down the tourist trade, and spends the rest of the movie getting the adults into tight corners. A touch of the Spielbergs in that the action is seen from the kid's viewpoint, but the plot's predictability is well-matched by short measures in both acting and direction. The obnoxious kid becomes the slasher's target, and one feels rather cut up when he isn't.