The Dyatlov Pass Incident

I'm on record as not being a fan of Found Footage Horror. But I was ready to give _The Dyatlov Pass Incident_ a passing grade, maybe even a positive one. Until the ending. The sudden emergence of PS2 graphics was bad enough (especially for something that is supposed to have been captured on a real-world camera) but something happens (no spoilers) in that same sequence which just doesn't make any sense, even completely contained within the movies own canon. These things took me out of it completely, and sullied what could have been a surprisingly good experience.

_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._

**_Trying to discover the truth about the Dyatlov Pass Incident of 1959_**

Five students from the University of Oregon obtain a grant to conduct an expedition to the infamous pass in the northern Ural Mountains to try to figure out what happened to the nine Russian hikers who perished there 53 years earlier. While the excursion starts out promising, things go from bad to worse.

“Devil’s Pass” (2013) is found footage adventure/horror/sci-fi that’s way better than I thought it’d be, speaking as someone who’s generally not big on found footage flicks, unless they’re done right. What’s great about this one is that the cast & crew literally went to the snowy mountains in Russia to shoot the film.

Yet it wasn’t shot anywhere near the Dyatlov Pass, but rather in and around Kirovsk, which is in extreme northwest Russia not far south of eastern Sápmi, aka Lapland. This is roughly 3400 miles northwest of the infamous pass, by vehicle. They obviously shot here because it was more accessible and cheaper compared to filming near the remote pass, not to mention the Khibiny Mountains are generally more scenic in a rugged sense compared to the Urals.

I like how various theories are thrown around in the story with commentary on The Philadelphia Experiment circa 1943. However, that alleged event had zero to do with teleportation, but rather attempted to make the USS Eldridge ‘invisible’ to radar detection by manipulating magnetic fields.

As for what the students find at Kholat Syakhl, aka Dead Mountain, let’s just say that the scriptwriter Frankenstein-ed the concept of Nightcrawler of the X-Men.

This movie is, of course, a fantastical account, but what really happened at Dyatlov Pass in 1959? The top theory is that 3 feet of shifting snow during the snowstorm suddenly fell on the tent at night, which panicked the nine inhabitants. Fearful of an actual avalanche, they cut themselves out of the tent and fled without proper attire. When they realized an avalanche wasn't going to happen, some tried to make it back to the tent but died of hypothermia in the -13 degrees Fahrenheit weather (it was no doubt difficult to find the camp in those conditions). What happened to the others is well explained in an 11-minute documentary called "Is Dyatlov Pass Mystery Finally Solved," available for free on Youtube (jump to 7:33 to skip the recap of the entire incident).

It runs 1 hour, 40 minutes. Additional scenes were shot in Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi, Russia, by the Caucasus Mountains, just northwest of Georgia.

GRADE: B