Title – The Dyatlov Pass Incident aka Devil’s Pass (2013)

Director – Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea)

Cast – Matt Stokoe, Holly Goss, Luke Albright, Ryan Hawley, Gemma Atkinson

Plot – A bunch of student filmmakers run afoul of some nasty occurrences when they head to Russia to investigate a 50 year old true life mystery named the Dyatlov Pass Incident where 9 Russian hikers mysteriously and violently died on a hike in the 1950’s.

“Are you telling me you didn’t see those charges, or is that a herd of Ukranian exploding mountain goat’s!”

Review by Eddie on 14/08/2014

There are undoubtedly many people in Hollywood that must sit back at times and take stock of where there career’s went oh so wrong, people such as Tara Reid thinking back upon pie filled good times, Val Kilmer remembering what the bat suit felt like upon his once toned figure and directors like The Dyatlov Pass’s Renny Harlin, a man once trusted with hanging Sylvester Stallone off cliffs (Cliffhanger) and making sure Bruce Willis made people Die Hard (Die Hard 2) but now makes schlocky big budget Hercules films and even worse found footage horrors like this insipid effort.

It’s actually in some weird kind of way sad to see Harlin make a film this low in the standard of quality, for the man has shown in the past a great talent in making action movies seriously entertaining, with myself in particular finding great enjoyment in throwaway films of his such as Deep Blue Sea and I know my co-blogger Jordan has a special spot for Harlin’s great in a cheesy type of way thriller Mindhunters. With success and failures (Cutthroat Island ekkkkk) in his career Harlin shows none of his strengths here and also finds new failures in creating a film that features not a single interesting cast member and wasting a ripe true-ish story on a slowly paced and in the end extremely daft attempt to create a new Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity in the snow.

The group of college students/film makers led by Matt Stokoe’s annoying Jensen and Holly Goss’s equally lame Holly that you will be taking the journey to the Dyatlov pass with are a totally forgettable bunch of brats and twats that you couldn’t care less if the Yeti himself came out in the first 5 minutes and ate them all for brunch. For a found footage film to work well you need to be either invested in the characters or totally against them to fail but here you just don’t care either way there just plain annoying. Making matters worse is the potentially classic scenarios that could play out in the journey riffing off the real life incident (that by the way is all types of strange and worthy of a Google) but things consistently remain unbelievable and at times utterly stupid that it never gets into any type of mojo.

Absolutely not worthy of your attention and another sad step in the career of Harlin, The Dyatlov Pass Incident is budget filmmaking at its worst and horror at its least scary. For better times and even more snow filled frights you’re better off watching the in this case superior Cuba Gooding Jr caper Snow Dogs, now that’s what I call scary!

half a thinly hidden Russian bunker out of 5