alspoint Don't waste your time, unless you like a movies with major plot gaps about morons that go on a 27 mile hike in the mtns in the middle of winter, don't know Anything about the wilderness, and have nonsense endings. If you do, then have at it!

Andariel Halo This one appeared in my AmazonPrime all of a sudden, and had a generic enough description to not put me off too much in trying it out. Sexy young people lost in the woods have an alien encounter. The movie felt a lot like a found footage type dealy but surprisingly it wasn't, based on the camera cuts. It treaded carefully, moving at a steady pace without immediately divulging in its alien content and instead played to a more realistic set of fears of getting lost and divided, especially when one of the protagonists reveals he didn't bring a map because he knows the area well enough. Completely unsurprisingly, something happens later on to incapacitate him and thus leave the others completely lost and without a map. All throughout we get some minor incidents involving lights and malfunctioning electronic equipment that is standard of these sorts of alien encounter movies, and a lot of character interactions which shockingly turn out to be moderately intriguing, and the characters themselves aren't overtly annoying or insufferable or unrealistic.Ultimately, as calamities befall the group and the movie progresses, we start arriving near the end and we realize we haven't seen any actual alien-y stuff. We finally get one instance of someone being out and about when they should be unconscious, which then somehow turns into a fantasy dream sequence which doesn't quite go anywhere or hint towards anything. The big reveal at the end was genuinely shocking and awesome, and manages to frame the entire series of events in an even more unsettling light.But then you realize the film is basically over, and almost nothing has actually happened. We basically had a far superior movie unfolding in the background of this one, and it's only revealed to us over the course of half a minute once it's all over. I wouldn't mind this sort of movie with that sort of ending, but when so little actually happened in the movie itself, it becomes a major letdown.

Wuchak Released in 2013, "Another Kind" details events when four friends take a four-day snowshoeing hike in the Catskills and experience strange occurrences.This is a micro-budget small film, reportedly only costing $120,000, but it's so competently made it comes across as a bigger movie. It basically takes "The Blair Witch Project" template and makes a better movie. The four actors are all convincing and the dialogue, which might seem to contain a little too much bickering, is fairly realistic (I've been on trips with couples who frequently argue, so I know it happens). The first half hour is pretty humdrum, but then the events and filmmaking magic take you into the story. I almost never get creeped-out during movies, but a few parts of "Another Kind" were seriously creepy. Unlike some mystery movies that keep everything a mystery at the end, "Another Kind" spells it out, which will be a turn-off to some and a good thing to others. The film is short-and-sweet at 76 minutes and was shot in Catskill Mountains, New York, with the opening filmed in Brooklyn.GRADE: B***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further if you haven't seen the movie)The ending reveals that there's an extraterrestrial attack on earth, so how does this explain the eerie events that the hikers experience. Evidently, the aliens assigned to this particular sector were toying with the hikers, like a cat with a mouse. They were just having some good sport with these easily-conquered low-life humans.

re-eino Just had to watch this because I'm hooked on survival-theme movies. Maybe I had passed it if I had noticed it was one of those movies with a "mystery" element. It's hard enough to do a decent survival movie without any extra themes and true enough, this movie might had been at least decent as a strict survival movie.Everything starts promising enough. Two friends with their girlfriends leave a city for snow hiking in the forests. Soon enough however the mystery element comes to play and the movie fails instantly. There are several occasions where something irrational and not so subtle stuff happens. One of the guys is just constantly trying to convince the others that's not a big deal. Perhaps some hillbillies are playing pranks etc. and he succeeds every time! This is one of the major flaws in the movie and such a typical fail that it's very annoying. Nobody in their right mind would sleep comfortably and wait some new weird stuff to just happen in dark woods without giving it a second thought. Instead they would get back to their car as fast as possible even if it was only some hillbillies having fun at their expense. But no, they have to wait until parasites begin drilling into their skulls before they're convinced it's probably safer to get back home.So why did we need the mystery element here? Probably the writer / director realized he didn't have any new ideas for a survival movie and thought he could get off the hook by adding the mystery element. Very few movies in the genre have anything new to add, but I still rather watch another unoriginal realistic movie than a stupid one that's not even funny (unlike The Core which is hilarious). If you find some guilty pleasure from survival movies, then there are much better options you might have not seen yet from The Poseidon Adventure to Open Water and 127 Hours and many more in between.