Zoe
is the only woman on this ten-day hike, so she is already the “Final Girl.” By
the way, doesn’t “ten-day hike” have a similar ring to “three-hour cruise?”
Needless to say, they will quickly veer off course, but getting lost is the
least of their worries in Eric Blue’s Beacon
Point
(trailer here),
which premiered at the 2016 Dances with Films.
Drake
Jacobs is usually a pretty good trail-master, but Zoe and her fellow hikers are
catching him on a bad day. He just accidentally killed his boss when confronted
with his manslaughter conviction. Unfortunately, this will not be the Drake’s
lowest nadir in the film. Flushed with panic, Jacobs hustles his ten-day tour
hikers on their way, promptly leading them off the trail (that would be the
Appalachian Trail). For a while they buy his excuses about avoiding “tourist
attractions,” but it soon becomes clear they are lost.
They
also realize they are not alone out there. Something is watching them. In fact,
Zoe’s strange dreams suggest the malevolent unknowns might already be messing
with them in an X-Files-Communion sort
of way. Frankly, there is an excellent chance those are not dreams. Yet,
despite the gravity of the situation, Jacobs keeps acting like a jerkweed.
Okay,
so we have been down this road before plenty of times (some of the production
design elements even seem to echo the
look of the original Predator).
However, Blue maintains a brisk energy level and the characters have surprisingly
engaging backstories (like the two brothers getting to know each other after
the death of their shared bigamous father). That otherworldly totem is also
pretty cool looking.
Jon
Briddell chews the scenery like a champ as Jacobs, the half-villain. Rae
Olivier’s Zoe is rather pedestrian, but at least she is a relatively proactive and
assertive figure (she is not waiting around for a man to save her, that’s for
sure). Eric Goins also keeps the potentially shticky Dan, a schlubby tech firm
divorcé hoping to find his inner Grizzly Adams, relatively grounded and
credible.
