Another Kind

I can see why many people will dislike this movie. It's a bit slow if you're looking for action rather than atmosphere, many details are left unexplained, and what is explained comes way out of left field. But I felt the bizarre and unexplainable events only added to the creepy atmosphere of the cold wilderness. I actually found myself wishing the filmmakers had left even more to the imagination, as the underlying explanation seemed to cheapen the rest of the movie somewhat. I still found myself quite satisfied when the credits rolled, but I think a more ambiguous ending would have been a better fit and given this movie a more lasting feeling of horror.

So while not without its flaws, overall I felt it was a much more interesting movie than its current rating would suggest. It reminded me of YellowBrickRoad, another creepy and bizarre wilderness horror with widely divided opinions.

Released in 2013, "Another Kind" details events when four friends take a four-day snowshoeing hike in the Catskills and experience strange occurrences.

This is a micro-budget small film, reportedly only costing $120,000, but it's so competently made it comes across as a bigger movie. It basically takes "The Blair Witch Project" template and makes a better movie. The four actors are all convincing and the dialogue, which might seem to contain a little too much bickering, is fairly realistic (I've been on trips with couples who frequently argue, so I know it happens). The first half hour is pretty humdrum, but then the events and filmmaking magic take you into the story. I almost never get creeped-out during movies, but a few parts of "Another Kind" were seriously creepy. Unlike some mystery movies that keep everything a mystery at the end, "Another Kind" spells it out, which will be a turn-off to some and a good thing to others.

The film is short-and-sweet at 76 minutes and was shot in Catskill Mountains, New York, with the opening filmed in Brooklyn.

GRADE: B

***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further if you haven't seen the movie)

The ending reveals that there's an extraterrestrial attack on earth, so how does this explain the eerie events that the hikers experience. Evidently, the aliens assigned to this particular sector were toying with the hikers, like a cat with a mouse. They were just having some good sport with these easily-conquered low-life humans.

This one appeared in my AmazonPrime all of a sudden, and had a generic enough description to not put me off too much in trying it out. Sexy young people lost in the woods have an alien encounter.

The movie felt a lot like a found footage type dealy but surprisingly it wasn't, based on the camera cuts. It treaded carefully, moving at a steady pace without immediately divulging in its alien content and instead played to a more realistic set of fears of getting lost and divided, especially when one of the protagonists reveals he didn't bring a map because he knows the area well enough. Completely unsurprisingly, something happens later on to incapacitate him and thus leave the others completely lost and without a map.

All throughout we get some minor incidents involving lights and malfunctioning electronic equipment that is standard of these sorts of alien encounter movies, and a lot of character interactions which shockingly turn out to be moderately intriguing, and the characters themselves aren't overtly annoying or insufferable or unrealistic.

Ultimately, as calamities befall the group and the movie progresses, we start arriving near the end and we realize we haven't seen any actual alien-y stuff. We finally get one instance of someone being out and about when they should be unconscious, which then somehow turns into a fantasy dream sequence which doesn't quite go anywhere or hint towards anything.

The big reveal at the end was genuinely shocking and awesome, and manages to frame the entire series of events in an even more unsettling light.

But then you realize the film is basically over, and almost nothing has actually happened. We basically had a far superior movie unfolding in the background of this one, and it's only revealed to us over the course of half a minute once it's all over.

I wouldn't mind this sort of movie with that sort of ending, but when so little actually happened in the movie itself, it becomes a major letdown.

Acting was a bit poor, but a creepy atmosphere made this film watchable

Loved the characters - the film is a bit funny and scary. Great ending.