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In an effort to inject more jeopardy into his life, an impulsive and rather naïve young man steals the money he is supposed to turn over to a gangster named Eddie, and takes off into the desert to hide out. This criminal mastermind then leaves Eddie a message indicating that his girlfriend wasn’t involved. Eddie promptly goes to the girlfriend’s apartment to get the information out of her. While he is there, however, the absconder calls and gives away his location – a motel called the Desert Inn – and adds that he may hide out in a ghost town for a few days. Eddie of course listens in to the entire conversation, then beats feet out in search of his double-crossing employee.
Meanwhile, at the Desert Inn, our hero (whose name is never revealed), has more pressing concerns on his mind. Trixie, a snooping maid, has spotted his suitcase full of cash and is determined to get her mitts on it, even if it means doing away with the suitcase’s present owner.
Content
For only a 16-minute film, Desert Story gets through quite a lot of action in a short period of time, and gets the point across very well. I especially liked the opening of the movie. It starts with a black screen, then an audio voice-over in the form of an answering machine message in which the hero informs his boss Eddie that he plans to abscond with his money. I also really liked the reasoning given; this criminal mastermind simply wants “more jeopardy” in his life. Well, he definitely gets it.
The ending to the film was interesting, though somewhat predictable. It seems as though the hero of the film is a complete idiot for fleeing with his obviously dangerous boss’ cash, and then calling his girlfriend to let her know where he is. He is then even more of an idiot for – after he realizes that he’s being watched by someone – revealing the fact that he has such a large amount of money, and then not trying to better protect himself. In fact, my sentiment was that he deserved to get knocked off in the end just for being such a moron. It would’ve added a better twist to the story if he had meant to mislead Eddie in an attempt to take him out and had already stashed the money somewhere else.
Normally I don’t bring up continuity issues as every movie has several dozen of them. However, there’s at least one large – and very noticeable – on at the end of this movie. When the main character’s car malfunctions, he leaves the hood up and runs off into the desert. When he returns, however, he falls against the car whose hood is back down. And in a later shot, the hood is up again. It’s not a major issue, but is still a little distracting and might be a good idea to use a different shot or do a quick re-shoot.
Visual Look
This film has a very interesting visual look. It’s shot in a grainy black-and-white style that almost gives it the look of a modern-day western. Many of the shots looked handheld, but were very smooth and not too jerky. There were some very interesting shots as well, such as a point-of-view shot while the maid was spying on our hero through a peephole.
Unfortunately, there were a few visual issues that really detracted from the film itself. At many points, block-shaped artifacts would show up in the image. I noticed this happened several times while watching the film on a computer, and when I put it into an actual DVD player and watched it on a TV, the artifacts just got worse. The film itself also stopped and jerked so many times within the first minute that I had to shut it off. The artifacts could have been caused by rendering or may have been due to compression, but either way this issue really needs to be corrected by either re-rendering or re-importing.
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