Kids get lost in the Alaskan woods looking for a pot patch and run afoul of… a Native American psychopath? A Native American spirit? Unsure, but it’s Native American, and in a way that’s mildly racist, or at least orientalist… there’s really nothing to the Native American element except in-scare-quotes-“exoticism”.
Plus, plot holes galore. Things come and go, like a mute character that joins the movie for a few minutes, that are just never explained, people are apparently gravely injured multiple times yet keep on keeping on, and even the fate of some of the main characters isn’t clear. The antagonist appears to be some sort of spirit originally, appearing to fade in and out, but later stops doing that and is apparently just a crazy guy (with a *lot* of bodies laying around his campsite.)
That’s the bad. And all in all, make no mistake: I don’t recommend this movie as something to watch.
There’s an upside, though. This builds slowly to an almost “Cannibal Holocaust”-level visceral gore flick by the third act. It probably won’t please the “Cannibal Holocaust” crowd, because it’s a slower burn than that, not a full-throttle screaming nightmare, but I’m not the “Cannibal Holocaust” crowd, and I actually liked it better for that. Normally I don’t go for that sort of thing, I think it’s a cheap substitute for plot or entertainment value or whatever. I like that this held it in reserve for later in the movie.
I can’t say I even necessarily liked this. But I liked that it managed to do gore in a way that felt cinematic and like part of an actual movie plot instead of the other way around, built up to it… not just went gore-gore-gore-look-at-all-this-gore… and, thankfully, that it was certainly not “splatstick” gore comedy or even cartoonish over-the-top hollywood gore. I’m not a fan of gore but I’m enough of a fan of “not splatstick” that well-done, unflinching, non-cartoon gore flicks sometimes can work on that level, as pure escapism, if they can stick to it. This one does.
It’s too bad it’s so bad on the whole, because the few things about it that were good, I liked quite a bit. And it was only very-poorly-thought-out bad, not full-of-cliches bad, which is always refreshing. It’s an unusual mix, for sure, but unfortunately not quite enough so to recommend.