Seven college kids have their friendship tested to the breaking point when they find eighty bars of gold.

SYNOPSIS:

Seven college students on a road trip -- ABEL, BAKER, CHARLIE, DAVID, EDDIE, FRANKIE and GARY – find a disabled Army truck on a desert road with two dead soldiers and eighty ingots of gold. The soldiers apparently stole the gold and died fighting over it. Over Delta’s objections the friends decide to take it, trusting in their friendship to avoid the soldiers’ fate.

But their station wagon won’t move with all that weight. Good-natured Abel volunteers to stay behind, since he is the heaviest. The others applaud him and promise to return.

But the suspension repeatedly drops on the bad back roads, each time forcing the friends to toss someone else overboard. Being left behind means possible abandonment and even death, so they use whatever they can – appeals to morality, bribery, sex – but force wins out. Gary, the jock, backed by Eddie, who carries a sidearm, forces rich kid Baker out at gunpoint and ejects his own girlfriend, Swedish exchange student Frankie, in a fit of jealousy when she offers sex to all if she can stay.

A local farmer fixing his pickup spots the gold and Eddie shoots him dead. They had been inching closer to the line between man and beast, and now they’ve crossed it. Charlie gets hysterical and her girlfriend Delta has to calm her down – but the next time the suspension drops, Gary cynically drives a wedge between the lovers by revealing that Charlie has been sleeping with Eddie. It works – Delta, disgusted with Charlie, volunteers to stay behind and let Charlie go on with Eddie and Gary.

The threesome reach the freeway and smooth sailing – but when Charlie tries to steal the car to go back for Delta, Gary turns them around to make Delta pay. Eddie ups the ante by shooting Delta and forcing them to go back and kill the others. Gary thought he was in control but Eddie is the one with the gun and, underneath his frat-boy charm, the most ruthless. But Delta is only wounded and follows in the farmer’s pickup. When Eddie kills Frankie and Gary is enraged, Eddie kills him too.

They drive back to Baker where dirt-poor Eddie kills the rich kid in cold blood. On the way back where they started to get Abel, Charlie begs Eddie not to kill him – but he’s already dead from heat prostration. The suspension drops once more and Eddie is about to kill Charlie when Delta arrives in the pickup to kill Eddie with the dead farmer’s shotgun. Charlie and Delta, both badly wounded, abandon the gold as dead weight to look for a hospital. It’s anyone’s guess if they will survive.

The station wagon, the gold, the Army truck, and four bodies – the two soldiers, Abel and Eddie -- lie silent in the desert sun. After a moment, there is dust on the horizon. A small tour bus approaches. It stops to examine the scene.

LOOT