I just saw SWH and was disappointed in the ending. It seems the project may simply have run out of funding, and thus we get this undeveloped and unsated feel to the story and its conclusion. The opening scenes give no tell-tale hint that this is a budget film. The vast expanse of the California Mojave desert and the feeling of desolation I thought were captured quite well. The film doesn't look cheap. Perhaps the producers/underwriters thought that this would be yet another zombie flick with the walking dead spilling over from a crowded Death Valley. There would be body parts and guts and entrails littered all along the lonely desert highways, and dotted with splattered brain pieces and eyeballs impaled on the daggers of the Joshua trees. Seeing none of this money-making gore, but instead those rubber masks perhaps the producers just walked in on the project and said "no more funding," and pulled the plug. Too "indie" looking. Thus we get this very abrupt and raw ending. The maid in the hotel room in the final scene was a metaphor for "we just couldn't clean this mess up!" It is what it is. Sam is in hell.

I have two takes on what the SWH may have intended to be, but was never developed, or allowed to be. First, I think it is reminiscent of the original Twilight Zone hosted by Rod Serling. The TZ was usually occupied mainly by people getting their come-uptance for some non righteous deed. In the 1961 TV episode titled "Deaths-Head-Revisited," a nazi official who was once in charge of a World War II concentration camp goes back to his "alma mater" now a deserted place and in ruin perhaps to re-live "the good ole days." Instead he encounters, or thinks he sees the ghosts of his victims. He goes mad. He's in hell.

I think Sam is already dead when we first see him in the desert shop. Or, Sam is in some purgatory state, or Twilight Zone awaiting a final judgment--to live, or to die. He denies he is a child killer. However, Eddy, the Voice of desert radio, seems to show tapes that suggest perhaps Sam isn't so innocent. Eddy, or is it St. Peter, the Protector of Heaven's Gate and final judge of the sum of man's earthly deeds denies Sam entry. Sam is thus doomed and damned to die. Next exit, hell.

Second, I think SWH tries to be a remake or borrows quite heavily from the 1990 movie "Jacob's Ladder," starring Tim Robbins. Robbins is wounded in a firefight in Vietnam. He is near death. What happens when we are about to die? Some say our entire lives flashes before us in the moments just before death. Why is that? Is it the effects of medication, or is it the protocol of death we all must endure? Author, Ambrose Bierce wrote a very haunting tale about a man with a rope around his neck about to be hanged on the gallows. We go through his last pitiful and sorrowful seconds including THE moment of execution. Or, does Death give him a reprieve? The short story is titled "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Rod Serling showed it as an episode of Twilight Zone first in May 1962.

After the scene in Vietnam, we next see a healthy Tim Robbins in New York City, being a typical subway riding everyday New Yorker. He is haunted however. There is a strange reddish, or pink light hovering. What is it? Well, it is the light over the operating table he is on when he was shot in Nam, and lay dying. This light serves as a separator for flashbacks---New York and Nam. This device is shown in the film frequently so there is no spoiler, or mystic concept going on. Like Sam in the Mojave desert there are vacant places and strange places of desolation Robbins runs into, even in New York. From these places emerges something strange----men in rubber masks that vibrate very rapidly. Robbins flees them and barely escapes. Who ARE THEY? Why are they after him? It becomes quite apparent that as man lay near death, death is literally knocking at the door----coming to take the dead away. You may escape for a while, and cheat death oh so temporarily, but eventually Death catches up to us all.

So, SWH was trying to some extent use the same icons and imagery as "Jacob's Ladder." In SWH the hovering light (I believe) is the last light just prior to death, just like in JL the light over the operating table as Robbins lay mortally wounded. Sam may already lay dying in the hotel room floor looking up at the ceiling light in the bathroom as Death was about to take him away. The people in rubber masks? Death. They know your last time on earth is near, they are coming to getcha because well, that's what death does. At least inJL there is still enough story to have some mysteries, something to bite on. No such development exists in SWH.

For people that ARE intrigued and like the feel of SWH, like I was but was ultimately dissatisfied I suggest you see "Jacob's Ladder." I hear it now has some cult status. I remember when I first saw it, and the lingering haunting effects it had on me after watching it almost 20 years ago.