Las
Vegas casino heir Ted Binion once shaved all the hair off his body so the
Nevada Gaming Commission would not be able to test it for drug use. Needless to
say, they would have found plenty. Delicate viewers should not fret. We will be
spared any potentially provocative scenes of that nature in Josh Evans’ Death in the Desert (trailer here), a needlessly
fictionalized treatment of the Binion case, which releases today on VOD.
Binion’s
Horseshoe was old school, downtown Las Vegas and Ted Binion was its public
face. Cheetah’s is classic Vegas, having already gained infamy as the setting
of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. It was
there the technically still married “Ray Easler” (as he is called in John
Steppling’s scaredy-cat adaptation of Cathy Scott’s true crime book) meets Kim
Davis (Sandra Murphy). She will go from stripper to mobster’s kept woman in
about five minutes of screen time.
Of
course, Easler is not supposed to associate with known racketeers if he wants
to keep his gaming license. He is not supposed to do drugs either, but he regularly
hoovers up coke, Xanax, and black tar. Davis tries to moderate his intake, but
it is a hopeless battle. Easler’s addictions are too severe and his daddy
issues are too deeply rooted. Easler simply isn’t half the man his cold-hearted
mobster father was—and he will never let himself forget it. Despite her
apparent affection for the wildly unstable Easler, Davis starts a furtive
affair with his henchman, Matt Duvall (Rick Tabish). Ironically, it will be Duvall
that Easler recruits to help hide his silver.
They
call Nevada the Silver State, but Easler really took it to heart. He amassed an
enormous cache of silver bullion and coins, which now must be hidden from his
soon-to-be ex-wife and the dreaded Gaming Commission. Logically, he decides to
bury them in the middle of the desert, because that is what you do in Nevada.
It
is hard to fathom Desert’s reason for
being, since there was already a made-for-Lifetime movie about the Binion
affair that had sufficient guts to use the principals’ real names. However, the
erratic, hard-drugging Binion/Easler does seem like a character more in the
wheelhouse of Michael Madsen than Matthew Modine. There is no question Madsen
is the show to see in Evans’ watered-down tabloid tale, but Roxy Saint adds a
bit of goth spice singing and vampy as Cory, Davis’s alt-rocker colleague at
the strip joint.
Shayla
Beesley looks convincingly like a stripper, but Steppling does not give her any
decent dialogue from which viewers could fairly base any further judgements. To
further stack the deck against her, most of her scenes not including Madsen are
opposite the alarmingly over-made-up Paz de la Huerta. Is she supposed to be
related to Tammy Faye Bakker? At least she registers. John Palladino’s blow-dried
Duvall has to be one of the flattest, most vapid performances you will ever immediately
forget.
