SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is the found-footage story of a group of filmmakers who go to Dyatlov Pass in Russia - a real place, where people really did die mysteriously (they tore their tent open and ran out into the snow barefoot, where they were found frozen to death! Google away, it's quite the mystery) - to make a documentary about the aforementioned incident. Surprisingly enough, the process ends up killing them as well. Finding of footage ensues.
This movie seems interesting as it gets going. They start discovering strange things that don't seem to add up, and seem kind of silly (like bigfoot footprints), leading you to wonder just where this is going. Where it goes gets interesting, right before it gets dumb.
The last 20 minutes or so of this movie get seriously scary. It's the first movie I've done this month which did actually scare me. It's wandering through the dark in an abandoned compound, knowing something bad is in there. Which is great... until they reveal the bad thing that's in there, which turns out to be mutant zombies borrowed from a video game. They are lame CGI monsters, not at all hidden in shadows, but just right there in front of you to marvel at how lame they look. It was amazing, I was right on the edge of my seat, wondering what was going on in the dark up ahead... and then the second it appeared, all nervousness evaporated and I instantly become bored and annoyed. That's certainly a lesson in filmmaking.
But that's not where the bad ends. After running away from the cartoon monsters, the movie devolves into the ultimate in over-explaining and extreme exposition overload, trying to make sure nobody misses anything about what's going on. It's so fakey and weird, and it's capped off by a final shot where it zooms in on "the big reveal" which is revealing something you'd have to be brain-dead to not already know, and yet it spends 30 seconds zooming in closer and closer, and the monster it's zooming in on obligingly turns its head to make sure you can clearly see the thing it's trying to show. It's just
so insulting.
And back on the flip of the flipside, the actual explanation of things is pretty good. It all kinda works out and makes interesting sense. If only I had figured it out for myself from clues instead of having it repeatedly drilled into my skull, I would've liked this movie! That kind of fun twisty concept is just what I want out of a movie. I just don't want it spoon-fed to me.
So in the end, there is a body count of about 14, and the movie gets a frosty
2 out of 5 Tongues.
For this movie, I just drew some of the scenery. The fun thing about drawing mountains, which proves I am not an artist, is that I can just sort of randomly crosshatch in different directions rather than match any sort of real thing. Which is nice, because real stuff is hard to do.
