The Girl On The Mountain

This movie was so horrible I couldn't even make it through the first half hour. So badly written. No one did even the slightest bit of research on living in the wild. Just one dumb example: The guy's camp is by a river and you see him dip a canteen into brown water and drink from it. No filtration at all. Then the girl is at his camp and again, right by the water, but she's so thirsty that he gives her water from his canteen. Why would she be thirsty if she is right by the water? Another example, he shoots what is obviously a domesticated rabbit out in the wild using a rifle with a huge caliber and then doesn't gut it and carries it back to his camp..What a waste of money.

The problem with this is the screenwriter, Matt Sconce. This movie is like as Masters project at UCLA. The brittleness, absence of narrative fluency, and the absence of story imagination is the problem. It feels like it was written on a tight deadline by a beginner. The bad guys in the movie remind me of 1950s Disney TV show villains: one-dimensional, cartoon-like, no subtlety of character development. They're only there so Daniel O'Reilly's character has bad guys he can play against. The movie is basically a good rough cut that an experienced director could backfill with narrative nuance, character development, imaginative camera work, and editing.

Beautiful scenery. Big promise of mystery and adventure at the start but it fizzles out pretty much from about 1/4 of the way in. Predictable, dull, pretty poorly acted and scripted. Skip this one and just rent Murder Mountain for real-life murder mystery. If it wasn't for the scenery, if would be a complete magot.