There is an awful lot wrong with this picture, beginning with a script that is both obvious and redundant. Courtney Cox plays a comic book artist who escapes to a small desert town after being raped twice in the big city. She immediately is stalked by a local who appears quite unhinged (Craig Sheffer), and who seems to be attempting a third rate Mickey Rourke imitation. D.B. Sweeny is a local cop, who is supposedly there to protect and serve. Meanwhile, the script manipulates the audience as to who's really the good guy? Logic flies out the window after the first ten minutes and never returns, and there are more unanswered questions than there should be. If you think "Blue Desert" might be saved by the wonderful Philip Baker Hall, you will be disappointed. His part is insignificant, just like the entire movie. - MERK

Lisa Roberts has been raped, so she leaves New York for her aunt and uncle's trailer in the desert community of Oneida. She lives there alone with her relatives' birds, but helpful neighbor Walter is next door with his wife Emily.Lisa is the illustrator for Iron Medusa comic books. While she is working on her art in a restaurant, she meets Randall, who likes her work (later we learn his daughter, who died in an accident, was a big fan of Iron Medusa). They become friends. Randall rides a motorcycle and enjoys the great outdoors, but he hates living in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. Though he explains he is living on disability and taking short-term work, he says his goal is to move to San Francisco and renovate houses.Randall wants to move his relationship with Lisa to the next level, but she is not ready because of her recent traumatic experience. What happens next brings Deputy Steve Smith into the picture. He is very nice and suspicious of Randall.Something strange is going on in this town. It may involve Joe and another man Lisa sees outside the trailer.There's not anything really special about this movie, though Lisa is confident and determined while never completely overcoming her nervousness, and she has plenty of reasons to be scared. Lisa's art (according to the credits, Matthew Nelson's) is really good and probably has real therapeutic value because she can pretend to dispose of the villains in her life. In reality, it is not that easy. (By the way, I'm not interested in comic books or their art.)Courtney Cox, D. B. Sweeney and Craig Sheffer all give good performances. The circumstances provide us with the occasional chilling moment, and the obligatory creepy music shows up from time to time. Most importantly, a number of plot twists keep us constantly guessing. There is more violence than I would have liked, and obviously some sexual content--not necessarily of a violent nature.I was disappointed by the ending. I'm sure nothing significant was edited out, but it seemed to me the writers dug themselves a hole and then found a white rabbit with a pocket watch.This was a pretty good thriller.

This movie is about a female rape victim/comic book writer from New York that decides to get away from all that awful big city glamor and move to a dirty, run down small town where she finds refuge in a single-wide trailer on a dirt lot in the middle of 12th and nowhere. The townspeople are mentally ill, yet so is she for inviting crazy men into her trailer. Annoying is the fact that she has the ability to do exactly the right thing to place herself in dangerous circumstance after dangerous circumstance. DB Sweeney's performance was high school at best. He's one of those kinda-cute young actors with a sweet grin. Unfortunately career has not been kind and mother nature has been right in tow. To the previous commentator stating that the acting was "so real", well I agree. Actually it wasn't acting. The two main characters really are pathetic, weak and incapable of making mature, healthy decisions. In brief, this movie sucks like no other, rent it to laugh at it. The real crime scene? The atrocious Wood paneling in the trailer - enough to make ME commit murder. And lastly, she's a artist/writer, so couldn't she afford a double-wide trailer and something other than a sun-yellow Chevy Chevette for love of god!

This movie should win an award for dumbest female protagonist. It's hard to have any sympathy for the Cortney Cox character, Lisa, because every time she is given an opportunity to avoid a threat, she decides to remain. She has a million opportunities to leave this town and the two nuts who are threatening her, but she remains. You have to wonder if Lisa has any shred of common sense because time after time she does the exact opposite of what common sense would dictate.If being an empowered woman means staying in a mobile home in the desert in a town of strangers and continually letting strange men into your home even when you know they are dangerous and never asking your neighbors for help, then the life span of such a woman is going to be very short.Comic book artists have very tight deadlines that they must meet each month.It was amazing to see Lisa working calmly at her drawing board, pencilling, inking and lettering a complete comic while spending her days and nights being nearly raped, chased across the desert in her Chevette by a police cruiser and sticking a 5 inch knife in a police officer's thigh. All in a days work for "EMPOWERED WOMAN" I guess.