“Where were you when I created the stars?”
Believe it or not, I curate this column. I try and only write reviews of movies that I liked or that I found interesting in some way. Sure, time constraints or editorial concerns mean I sometimes end up reviewing a film I didn’t like, but generally I want Fear Flashback to feature good movies – or at least so-bad-they’re-good movies.
You can see where I’m going with this, right?
So yes, I didn’t much enjoy Black Mountain Side, and in a regular week I’d just watch something else and review that instead. Unfortunately, it’s a tight week and I’m out of time. If you prefer to read positive (or relatively positive) reviews or noodling about a film, you may want to pass this one by.
This isn’t my first tilt at Black Mountain Side. I’d watched a good twenty minutes or so when it first came out and bailed because I was bored and annoyed. I’d kept meaning to go back to it, in part because it’s always in the recommendations of “if you liked this, you might like that” on the streaming sites I frequent. I’d held off until this week, but it was recently recommended to me by a friend. That’s a fraught thing. I’m always worried about disliking a film that someone else enjoyed. So, I’m sorry Paul.
The Medium
I watched Black Mountain Side on Tubi. It’s also available for subscribers via Prime, Screambox, and Midnight Pulp, and free with ads on Roku, Fandango at Home, Plex and PlutoTV.
There is no Region A Blu-ray release (only Germany and Australia), but there was a DVD release that is now out of print.
The Movie
Black Mountain Side is an independent horror film about a crew of archaeologists in the arctic who uncover a set of ruins that date back to just after the last ice age, roughly 14,000 years ago. As the film progresses and the weather worsens, it seems like something from the ruins is affecting the men, exacerbating their isolation and paranoia until something has to give.
I mentioned that this is an independent film in part to remind myself that many of the drawbacks of the film can be put down to lack of funds. (Supposedly less than $30,000.)
This is essentially an homage to The Thing, with ancient microbes and (possibly) ancient gods filling in for shapeshifting alien monsters. The algorithm isn’t wrong – this is definitely in my wheelhouse. I love horror movies set in arctic/antarctic locals, and I count John Carpenter’s The Thing amongst my favorite movies of all time. That being said, this ‘aint no Thing.
For one thing, one of the key elements that the film harps on is that it’s supposed to be cold. Like, many degrees below zero (I assume Celsius, as this is Canada) cold. Characters mention it randomly, and sometimes one of them will act like maybe the sweater he’s wearing isn’t quite enough against the supposedly bone chilling temperature. I never really believe it, though, despite the fact that everything is covered in snow. The filmmakers just don’t take the time to really sell the chill to me. Only rarely do we see a character’s breath. Only late in the film do we even hear wind. It snows something like twice during the film. I know it’s a pain to depict breath on film, but it would be worth the effort once or twice – especially when people leave doors open all the time.
Why am I going on about temperature – something you can’t even see? It’s a lack of attention to detail that’s part of why the film doesn’t work for me. I want to invest in the film, in the setting, in the characters. I need to believe what the characters tell me, and I just don’t. The cold, the isolation, the paranoia – characters talk about this stuff, but I don’t see it happening. Not in a way that makes sense to me. There’s no urgency to their dilemma, no buildup to their violence.
And then there’s the acting. One or two characters – and god help me, I can barely tell them apart – are okay, but mostly there’s a distinctly flat and stilted delivery that means statements about supply shortages and mutating body parts all have the same weight to them. As people start to experience visions and voices and paranoia runs rampant the only thing differentiating those who are going crazy from those who are still clinging to sanity is how loudly they shout. There’s a moment early on when the director sends the camera swirling around a table where a poker game is taking place, introducing the characters and setting up their dynamic. At least that’s what I assume is the point of that scene. I still had no idea who these guys were by the end of the scene, and without believing in the characters, I couldn’t really believe in what happens to them.
Contrast that with The Thing (and I’m sorry, but the film begs the comparison), where the characters are all introduced with economy, but in a way that makes each one stand out. I still remember Palmer saying, “I was wondering when El Capitan was gonna get a chance to use his pop gun.” I can’t remember a single word of dialogue any of the characters in Black Mountain Side says. (Except that opening quote, which is from an apparition/god and is riffing on Job 38:4, so I kinda knew it already.) (And that should open up its own intriguing questions about that apparition, but the film doesn’t get into it.)
There ARE some moments of tension as the film progresses. A scene with one of the characters struggling with a voice telling him to just kill another character in the room is well done, and there’s a scene with a guy just sitting at a table, his arm severed, that is unsettling. The cinematography is generally good, and the night shots have a great look to them – they come the closest to making you believe it’s cold out. Mostly, though, there are scenes of dialogue that don’t’ seem to go anywhere or scenes of action that don’t seem to have any buildup. A guy goes nuts on a corpse (I think it’s a corpse) and the only reason given is the doctor saying something about how he’s not getting enough sleep.
The film is about uncovering things we don’t understand, and how that can infect us and our way of thinking. It’s also about how a thawing planet might unleash living things that we have no defense against. It’s also about ancient gods and their duty to planet vs humans. I think. There are a lot of cool ideas in the film, and I found myself wondering at times just how much better a film this would be if Larry Fessenden got a hold of it. Films like Wendigo and The Last Winter got me thinking and invested, even if they didn’t always stick the landing. I think that’s exactly what this film feels like – a Larry Fessenden script with someone else at the helm.
Eventually the film erupts in a… well, not an orgy of violence. A heavy petting of violence? Anyway, things come to a head and everyone struggles to survive, either physically or mentally. I’m still not exactly clear on what happened and why, but by the time the last character struggles through another snow field (one that at least did look cold to me) I had stopped caring.
The Bottom Line
Flat acting, stilted dialogue, unconvincing special effects and a storyline that is muddled at best – these are my takeaways from watching Black Mountain Side. I’ve read a bunch of reviews of this film, and they’re all fairly positive, so feel free to take this review with a grain of salt. For me, however, the film has a few moments of real interest, but never actually fits together in a way that works. I wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t get there.
