This formula competition film, set in the heretofore unexploited world of 4x4 off-road racing, is a would-be, low-rent LE MANS or LAST AMERICAN HERO for internal combustion fetishists of every stripe. Despite brand-name verisimilitude in the form of champion Roger Mears's real-life Nissan
Factory Team, DESERT STEEL is ample evidence that two guys, a stripped jeep, and a desert do not in themselves constitute an engaging narrative.
Two-fisted road warrior Zach Gardner (David Naughton) and his brother Brian (Scott La Rosa) are biding their time in dead-end delivery jobs, hoping to use Scott's revolutionary new engine and Zach's innate driving chops to storm the insular world of off-road competition. They get a leg up when
Mears adds Zach to his factory team, but Zach's maverick ways and inability to take direction quickly put him at odds with Tate (Russ Tamblyn), the team leader and head mechanic. In his first big showing for the team, Zach disdains a directive to come in and fill up his tank, and winds up running
out of gas just shy of the finish line. This is all the more painful because it affords an easy victory to his arch-nemesis Buck Edwards (J.J. Johnston). Zach is quickly sidelined, and this unlikely turn of events threatens to pull the plug on indie filmmaker Jerri (Amanda Wyss), who culled the
brothers out of the pack as the focus of her freelance documentary. Meanwhile, as a last-ditch bid to raise the money to float his prototype, Scott has resorted to loan sharks, and has been gambling in Vegas casinos to finance his impending balloon payment.
By the time Zach swallows his pride and is let back in the driver's seat for the big race, Scott has been kidnapped by the loan sharks, and is tied up in a safe house somewhere out in the desert. In a final show of chutzpah, Zach manages to take time out from the overland race, liberate his
brother, and still make it back in time to skunk Buck Edwards, saving the day and the documentary in tandem. With prize money in hand, the promise of romance looms large for Zach and Jerri.
DESERT STEEL is a by-the-numbers affair, but flashes of humor, Wyss's perkiness, and stock heavies Tamblyn and Johnston work to the film's advantage. With its lavish photography of souped-up engines and their many coterminous moving parts (much of it appearing as part of Jerri's Hi-8 video
documentary), the film suggests THE GREAT RACE as reimagined by the brain trust behind KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS. DESERT STEEL generally completes its designated circuit, and gets its audience safely back to where it started. But video buyers who shop by title alone, and expect some kind of Desert
Storm fireworks, will be sorely disappointed. (Violence, substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment
