Black Mountain Side Movie Review

​I recently watched a movie called Black Mountain Side directed by Nick Szostakiwskyj. It was released in January of 2016 in the USA. The description of the movie is what pulled me in to begin with, stating that a group of archaeologists find a structure buried in the ground in Northern Canada that is over ten thousand years old. As they continue to unearth the structure, their communications equipment fail and they find themselves stranded and begin to lose their sanity—very Lovecraftian from the description.
 
The movie was actually pretty interesting from the Lovecraftian standpoint. They bring in an expert who helps them try to identify the culture that built the structure and offer other tidbits of information. As they continue, workers begin to disappear, seeming to walk off the dig site into the Canadian wilderness, which given the location and the time of year basically equates to death sentence. 

​I’ll get into some spoilers later in this, but overall, I really enjoyed the slow pacing and build-up of tension as the team starts to lose their shit. Some of them start seeing and hearing things, while others become violent. For me, the story goes off the rails and loses steam with the ending which wasn’t a complete bummer, but it wasn’t the satisfying end I was hoping for. The acting is a sub-par in some spots, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from this kind of movie. Another thing that was kind of a letdown was the fact that the movie never shows you any of the artifacts they talk about. While not a necessary thing for storytelling, it felt somewhat lazy and probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to manufacture artifacts to show what they were referencing.
 
Overall, it was entertaining and played on some great horror tropes such as isolation, not really explaining or showing things that didn’t need to be shown, and leaving a lot to interpretation. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s hard these days to nail a perfect movie. I’d recommend it to fans of Lovecraftian horror. It felt like a nod to The Thing. I’d give it three out of five cephalopod bacteria.
 
Keep reading for a spoiler review.

The archeological team finds some symbols and artifacts that point out some sort of deer god that was worshiped by the culture that created the structure. There are also markers around the area that were placed later in the timeline by another (different) indigenous group of peoples. I had the sense that the markers were there to keep people away from the site because it was obvious that people who went near started going nuts. The team surmised that it was some sort of bacteria because one of the first people to lose their shit becomes ill, and starts throwing up some black liquid. They end up having to sever the person’s arm because there’s something moving around underneath the skin. After some tests run by the doctor on site, he determined that the bacteria was causing the cells to reform into tiny cephalopod-like creatures (octopus-squid things). This felt very out of place because there is never another connection to squids or octopi ever again in the movie. It almost felt like was force-feeding some Cthulhu-esque mythos into the movie. Plus, the big baddie manifests as an upright deer that talks to the archeologists, urging them to kill one another for various reasons. So I failed to see how the cephalopod angle was relevant or necessary in the movie. On top of that, no one else ever progresses that far into the disease (in that no one ever shows signs of having things move under their skin). In that aspect the story felt a little jumbled. On a different note, I don’t think they were just going crazy, because they all had visions of the same creature. While it’s possible to have a shared hallucination, I don’t think that was the direction the movie was going. 

​I found the deer god interesting on one hand, because it was a departure from what you would expect a malevolent being to manifest as. I mean, how scary is a deer? On the other hand, I never got a sense of what the deer god wanted. Was its motive just to sow chaos? It had the archaeologists at each other’s throats with deception, manipulation and dark little nudges when it was necessary. It was also obvious that the creature was trapped to the structure, because otherwise it would have left a long time ago. However, at one point the deer god asks one of the people, “what makes you think I’m trapped here?” or something similar.
 
Near the end, there are two team members left. One of them is injured via gunshot wound to the guts. He stays behind while the uninjured team-mate makes a run for it hoping to make it to a nearby reservation (a long shot for sure, but they had run out of options). The guy who stays behind gets it in his head to blow up the structure in the hopes that it will destroy the creature. This idea kind of comes out of left field and didn’t make a ton of sense to me.
 
The other guy ends up stepping on a bear trap on his way to the reservation. End of movie. It didn’t answer any questions, which is okay, but it didn’t even put us on the path to make our own inference as to what happened after the structure was destroyed. There just wasn’t enough throughout the film to give me any idea of what that would do, or if the creature wanted him to destroy it, or not. So in that aspect, the movie failed in my mind. But the build-up to that point was fun, reminding me of The Thing as I mentioned before. Worth a watch from a Redbox or if it comes to Netflix if this type of movie is your thing.