Black Mountain Side

I'll never, for the life of me, understand why people buy into Penn State every year. Each year, they come into the season with all this hype and then blow every big game. This year, I guess James Franklin wanted to switch things up and decided to blow a game against one of the worst teams in the country. Oh well, couldn't happen to a nicer university. With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on...

Black Mountain Side (2014)

This movie has been on my list for years, but either I haven't been able to find a stream once October rolled around, or I just ran out of dealer's choice days with too many movies that I had planned on watching. Much like many of the movies I watch on a whim, the recommendations were that it was a very good cosmic horror movie. And if you've been reading me for some time, you'll know that it's a genre that I find myself gravitating toward more often.

So, a group of scientists deep in the Canadian wilderness find some artifacts frozen in the ice. They believe the things they found date back 14,000 years. After unearthing them, things start to go bad. Weird things keep happening around the camp, the native workers up and leave despite having nowhere to go. And one by one, the scientists get a strange disease that doesn't make any sense. All the while, there's a growing paranoia between the survivors, and they're all starting to succumb to madness.

I have mixed feelings about this movie. It moves kind of slowly at first, but the mystery is just compelling enough to keep you interested. It plays a lot like The Thing, but keeps it more psychological. You don't get the awesome creature or gore effects; instead, it focuses more on the paranoia and how people start seeing this creature that looks like a deer but stands like a man. People will say it's in the room with them, but the person they're talking to can't see it. It keeps telling those who can see it to kill the others. It leads to a really creepy scene where one of the men, who was put in isolation for attacking others, practically begs one of his coworkers to see the creature standing right behind him.

It moves slowly but really finds its legs near the end, when the madness finally takes hold of them. The camera follows one of the men, the one who was always the most aggressive, as he methodically guns down the survivors. It's really effective because the movie doesn't play up the violence or the gore. It just follows him from cabin to cabin, shooting everyone. Neither the character nor the camera lingers long, which makes it more unsettling. The way it's shot makes it seem like this is an ordinary, mundane activity. The murdering is done very business-like, which makes the whole thing so much more unnerving. There's one where he shoots a guy, but he survives the first shot. While the shooter aims to fire again, the dude can only get his arm up in protest. It's incredibly effective, and as you watch him systematically wipe out his friends, you just hope someone is able to put a stop to it before he kills the entire camp.

The movie really shines at the end when we finally get to what it's been building to the entire time. After the massacre, the only sane people left decide they have to get out of there. One of them is too injured to leave, so the other agrees to hike in the darkness to try and find help. Remember, they're deep in the Canadian wilderness, it's not like there's a nearby town. Anyways, the injured man finally gets to see the deer god. They have a conversation, and there's a line from the god that I absolutely love. Its voice is deep and menacing; it sounds like what would come out if you walked up to a stranger on the street and asked them to do a monster voice. It says, "When an animal looks up at the night sky, what does it see? Thousands and thousands of tiny points. Then a man looks up at the same points and sees millions of stars; galaxies, within which are billions of planets. Do you want to know what I see? Were you there when I created the stars?"

So good! As much as I loved that little back and forth, it loses me a bit at the end of the conversation because you find out why this god is trying to get them to kill each other, and it loses a bit of the cosmic horror. If you can understand its motivations, it becomes grounded, but I digress. I want to talk a bit about the ending without giving it away. When I first saw it, I hated it. It felt so unsatisfying that I threw my hands up in the air. But a few minutes later, I stopped to think about it, and I decided it completely fit the movie. It had a Chekov's Gun moment set up earlier in the movie, and in Lovecraft's writing, there are no heroes to contend with; humans are ants compared to outside forces. The world is a bleak and uncaring thing in his universe; there's no rhyme or reason, no hero with a destiny, things happen, and the world moves on, blissfully unaware of the unnamed things just outside your vision. I can imagine the ending would piss off a lot of people, but I liked it. It puts a bow on their situation in what's probably the most fitting way possible.

7.5 Dr Chainsaws!