Purely Joyful Movie!

Fresh and Exciting

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

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.

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.

A group of hikers follow a guide onto a mountain of awaiting horrors. Beacon Point is a movie that leads you into unspeakable confusion, terror and anger before gently depositing you into a bed of utter nothingness.Hikers, set on finding the perfect view, follow a guide with a precarious secret. Even when lead past the scene of a what is determined to be an animal attack, they venture on to engage with an unknown entity. And what it wants, no human surrenders freely.Beacon Point started off with my interest peaked. I saw what I'd hoped to be full of potential, but it quickly fizzled out, leaving me flustered. I won't provide any spoilers, because you know I just don't do those, but I can say, when I discovered what was really happening, I wanted to end the movie then and there. It's always the same thing- especially when it comes to movies located in high mountain ranges or forests. The characters were slightly likable and the few jabs & laughs were fun. The side character, Zoe, carried purpose but her actions didn't speak for her previously shown situation, or her personality. Drake was the so-called male villain, but I liked him. He was stable in his instability and his acting was on point! The others were minor and insignificant, but they played their roles, allowing the movie to work. Sadly, none of the aforementioned changes the fact that at the ending left me feeling a bit cheated.I won't say it was awful, but it wasn't good either. I still rate it higher than most movies of this particular theme. Beacon Pointed released June 10, 2016 and is available on YouTube, iTunes, Amazon and more.