I don’t think anyone can hear about the tragedy known as “The Dyatlov Pass Incident” without forever being able to recall some details of the event. There were 9 bodies found, naked, with tents torn to shreds, some bodies had skull fractures and broken ribs, with no sign of struggle, and some with evidence of radiation. NOBODY REALLY KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED. Isn’t that insane? I might have also gotten some of those details wrong, but, like I said, I kind of got some info in there that might be correct. I heard about it a few years ago and it’s always kind of freaked me out. Well, when I heard that Renny Harlin was directing a movie named after the incident, I was interested to see what he would do with it. Would you believe that calling a movie “The Dyatlov Pass Incident” would be confusing as shit for your average person? Well, that’s why it’s now called “Devil’s Pass“. Even though the film plays out like a relatively generic “found footage” movie, the source material was interesting enough to take the plot into some interesting direction to set it apart from your average movie about a group of lost hikers.

Don’t worry, they leave the dogs behind. Wait! That’s probably their first mistake!

A group of five college students are given a grant to go explore the Dyatlov Pass to see if maybe they will be the ones to solve the mystery that happened there in 1959. A few of them are hikers with proper training, but there are also some that are there as filmmakers, along with a conspiracy theorist or two. The film is a combination of found footage and at some points has a documentary structure, so we learn early on that these students were never heard from again but that we are going to be watching their footage. Despite being met with a little bit of hostility from locals, they filmmakers are eventually able to make their way into the Ural mountains. Strange things start happening, between mysterious sounds echoing throughout the woods, strange footprints being found around their tents, and equipment malfunctions. One of the filmmakers finds a door near where the bodies were originally recovered, but an event in the middle of the night causes them injuries and leaves them without their supplies. Deciding that the only really option is to see what’s behind the door raises just as many questions as answers, but the viewer is left with the bizarre truth of the events that happened there at the original incident. No, I’m not going to tell you, you’ll just have to watch it for yourself.

I know it LOOKS like this guy ripped off his own monster dick, but I don’t THINK that’s what happened. I’ve been wrong before, though.

Basing a movie around actual events is always a touchy subject, because with something like The Fourth Kind, for example, the filmmakers made it seem like the reason there are so many disappearances in a small Alaskan town had something to do with aliens, which pissed of the people affected by those disappearances. I think the strange circumstances of the actual incident are so strange, it allowed the filmmakers to really go fucking nuts with their explanation of what happened, and I mean that in a good way. Different points of the movie suggest government conspiracies, aliens, yetis, and probably other, crazier shit that I can’t even remember. Even though the film itself wasn’t all that exceptional for a found footage movie about college kids going missing, the justification for it doesn’t really pop up until the last 15 minutes and is pretty unexpected.  It kind of reminded me of Chernobyl Diaries except if Chernobyl Diaries wasn’t as dumb and predictable. There’s also one really cool avalanche sequence that kind of creeps you out, because it takes place at night and really feels like the point of view of what it would be like to have to suffer through something like that. A lot of people might watch this movie and feel like they’ve seen it before, there’s just enough interesting stuff happening in the structure of them film and explanation for me to enjoy it other than some other mediocre movies I’ve seen of the same format.

Wolfman Moon Scale

IMDb