Beacon Point (2016)

I love this movie so much

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

I found the bulk of the story in this actually fairly interesting. Trail guide Drake Jacobs takes a group of somewhat unprepared hikers on to the Appalachian Trail. Then he takes them off trail ("what do you need a trail guide for if you're just going to hike the trail. You can just follow the tourists," he said.) and they end up lost and having to contend with - well - something. Some being. Some creature. Some force. Some disease. It wasn't really entirely clear what they were dealing with. Which actually made the movie more mysterious and actually even compelling. You follow along because you do want the mystery to be revealed, and because for the most part the performances from little known actors were decent enough.The problems with "Beacon Point," though, come at the beginning and end of the movie - probably the two most important parts of a movie. The movie opens by introducing us to Zoe - one of the hikers - but I thought it did so in a rather silly way and at least for that opening scene she didn't strike me as a serious character - which was too bad, because she emerges as the movie's most serious and central character. We then move on to Drake's confrontation with his boss before the hiking trip begins - a confrontation that served absolutely no purpose, because it had nothing really to do with the story that then unfolded. The movie wouldn't have unfolded any differently at all without that unnecessary scene. Meanwhile, after all the mystery about exactly what's going on, the movie resolves almost nothing. So you spend an hour and a half watching this and get left high and dry in the end. What happened to this group of campers? I guess we'll never know.And yet, I'll still give this a 6/10. The meat of the story and the mystery involved was compelling enough and kept me watching, even if, in the end, it let me down with that unsatisfying ending.

Something went seriously wrong with this movie, starting with the cold open. it starts with a bunch of white trash looking "militia" types with AR-15s with holo sights and very thick beards, looking like they're on a training mission in preparation for the next black president, when suddenly "something" attacks them, in a manner evocative of Predator. Dropping a quick and early spoiler right here; this entire sequence has absolutely nothing to do with the film at all. It doesn't come back to anything, doesn't hint at anything, and it's not clear if it even takes place in the same area that the movie is set in. Nothing about it comes up later. Then, we finally get into the actual movie, starting with a woman, Zoe, going on a hiking trip in the Appalachians. We also meet a guy who works there, named "Drake", when the boss finds out he has a criminal record and fires him. Drake handles this with the sort of maturity and restraint of a guilty child, barely clinging to his lie of "It's someone else" for 10 seconds before basically conceding it's him, then inexplicably gets into a pushing match with the boss, which equally inexplicably ends in hilarious fashion with the boss tumbling backwards over his desk, knocking over a pair of moose horns, with the moose horns spearing him through the eye and killing him. So Drake is now panicking and has to deal with taking on Zoe and a group of others on a 10 day hike through the Appalachians. All throughout, he is emotionally manic, needlessly belligerent, and just an overall bully with everyone involved. It comes not as a surprise that he gets into a fight with the hikers, but that it took as long as it did for him to do so. They tie him down and decide to go looking for Zoe's backpack, as she brought her father's ashes with her to scatter at a mountaintop area. Before this big fight sequence, we get a moment of them finding a dead coyote with its eyes torn out, then one of the hikers, Brian, gets a sickness around his eyes that looks similar to that. Then he suddenly gets better off-screen, then dies some time later with his eyes torn out like the coyote.Just before this, we got what was conceivably a nightmare sequence in which Zoe is wandering the woods at night, gets confronted by what is ostensibly an alien, and then wakes up in an alien-like sleeping tube, spotting Drake in a similar tube across from her. She and Drake discuss it in real life, confirming it wasn't just a dream. Then they come across a freaky looking totem which is very much not Cherokee, while earlier one of the hikers had found a bead that looked like nothing but he kept describing as "not native American" and looking like a scarab. At some point after Brian dies, they all just disperse, going their own way, before Zoe finds Drake again, sick in the eyes like Brian was, and they go into a cave where they find lots of tourists' baggage and Drake has a meltdown saying THEY'VE been watching us for generations, using our eyes like spy cameras. He then freaks out and tears out his own eyes and Zoe runs off and...Escapes. She scatters her father's ashes like she wanted. Inexplicably, she finds a "scarab" bead in his ashes, then she gets magically transported (or flashes back to) the alien sleeping tubes, where everyone is alive and awake and freaking out. Then the movie just ends, having barely done anything with its concept and seemingly unaware of it. They seemed to be implying an ancient aliens connection, but it was never even indirectly hinted at. It's as though a significant portion of the film were cut out and nothing further was done to rectify it.

"This was once all Cherokee land. It was considered sacred ground, and trespassers would be killed on sight."At the very least, you can say that "Beacon point" is a weird and rather strange movie. After seeing it you're wondering what in God's name it was about anyway. I started watching it without any clue what it would be about. And by the time the end credits rolled over the screen, I still didn't have a clue. In the first 15 minutes there are also some events which in hindsight had nothing to do with the whole story. It starts with a Predator-like scene where two hunters, who look like they have just returned from a Vietnam tour, are chased by something unknown in the forest. Then we see Drake (John Briddell) having an argument with his boss about his criminal past. The result is not too beneficial for Drake. Let's say a fallen antler with sharp ends plays a main role.Then there are some facts that aren't plausible and realistic enough too me. First of all the volunteers who want to follow the Appalachian Trail aren't asking any questions about the person Drake. I suppose they've paid a lot of money for this trip. And yet, nobody is wondering if Drake is the official guide and if he's experienced enough. The participants meekly submit their participation papers and follow the completely unknown and not officially introduced trail master.Even when they find a corpse after a bit of walking, Drake tells them it's just an unfortunate incident and that it's probably the result of a hungry bear the victim ran into while hiking through the forest. So, no problem. And they continue their trip in the assumption that someone else will solve the problem I guess. I know for certain I would turn around, because I wouldn't want to encounter that same hungry bear somewhere.It's also bizarre that in the rest of the film these events aren't mentioned again. As if it never happened. It seems like they've used these events to get a standard playtime for the movie. It seems like random events which have nothing to do with the story line. After these unusual occurrences, we get a lot of walking and puffing. The same as in "A walk in the woods" and "Wild".The participants are a colorful group consisting of Brian (Jason Burkey) and Cheese (RJ Shearer), two brothers who recently discovered they were brothers. Then there is Dan (Eric Goins), a jolly fat guy who left Silicon Valley behind for a while. And Zoe is an ex-real estate broker who concluded that she didn't want to end up like her father and, as a tribute, wants to scatter her dad's ashes in the Appalachians. Before they realize it, they are lost and discover an ancient Indian cemetery and later on a bizarre totem. And that's when strange things start to happen at night and the group of hikers are the victims of nightmares and illnessesNot only the course of the story and the cause of all this misery were strange. The most strange thing is that despite the unoriginal, bad dialogues, the ridiculous decisions and the total lack of explanation, I was fascinated by it in a certain way. There's a somewhat tense atmosphere. There are beautiful shots to admire made by a drone I guess. And the acting wasn't so bad after all (just ignore the dialogues). It's only the lack of knowing what happened actually that became an annoyance. Was it the trespassing of an old Indian cemetery that released an ancient curse? Or was it aliens that caused it all? Or did they eat some wrong mushrooms and became delirious? And why didn't they all get sick ? Believe me. You won't get an answer in the end. And the last images causes even more confusion and are a source of new speculations.If you expected a type of "X-files" after seeing the cover, you'll be deeply disappointed. And you can hardly call it horror. There's not one creepy or scary scene in it. The only effect this film had on me was that I'm sure I'll once visit those Appalachian forests. And I'm certain there won't be any martians to haunt me at night.More reviews here : http://bit.ly/2qtGQoc

Have you ever seen a film where the set-up ends up being nothing like the actual story? This is exactly what happens in "Beacon Point". It begins with a ranger being confronted by his boss for faking his past in order to get the job. He's fired but the two get in a shoving match and the boss is accidentally killed. Now you'd think this film would be about what the killer would do next and his next victims…but it really isn't where "Beacon Point" goes. Instead, the fired ranger acts like nothing happened and takes a group of campers on a trek through the Appalachians as if nothing happened…and then weird things start to happen. What exactly is happening is quite confusing…especially as you see things happen that leave you confused. For example, there's a guy on the verge of death one minute and later he's miraculously fine! There also are weird dreams that might or might not be real. The acting is very good in "Beacon Point" and I enjoyed seeing the Appalachian Mountain area of Georgia. I also appreciated how a lot was accomplished with a modest budget. But the problem is that the ending took a long time to materialize and left me feeling unsatisfied. The resolution to the problems the hikers are having just seemed to leave me flat. Not a bad film at all…but one that could have been better.