While the best horror films have
mined anonymous rural landscapes for maximum disturbing impact for over four decades now, including greats such as The Hills Have Eyes (1977), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and, to a lesser extent, Nightmare Circus (1974), Downrange places its carefree young ones in a
vast open
space facing unknown terror but the stakes never feel like much beyond an exercise in style.
Some students have a view of the polluted coastline where their parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents used to make a living, the abandoned
mining equipment that once tied their families» livelihoods to the company store, or the
vast clear - cut
space that was once a forest amid rolling hills.