Donner Pass

This film has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, but it did introduce me to Orenda Fink. So thank you, bad bad film.

The first 10 minutes of this film take a wonky factually inaccurate poke at the actual donner party events before deciding that would be too hard and might actually be an interesting tale of survival through disease, starvation and exposure and the desperation that turned them to cannibalism, so they time skip forward to the modern day and roll out the generic teens go on a holiday and get killed shite.

A very ordinary premise, an unexpected but retrospectively lame twist, a half-baked supernatural element, and a final girl detectable from the very first scene. My two favorite things about this film are perhaps totally immaterial: that it may be the first conventional horror movie I've ever seen directed by a woman, and that Adelaide Kane is about the hottest thing I've ever seen.

The first half of the film was pretty cool. Characters were well developed, the story work fine and Desiree Hall shined out of the cast. The latter half did not work that well, but the entire film was still enjoyable. Though the story did not end up that well thought through, the dialogue worked mostly excellent.