Survival Quest

Don Coscarelli's directorial filmography is a curious one. Of the ten movies he's directed, six are horror (four of which belong to the Phantasm franchise, the other two being Bubba Ho-Tep and John Dies At The End) or horror-adjacent, and one is fantasy (The Beastmaster). If you've seen any of his movies, it's one of these seven, guaranteed. Of the other three, two are low-budget family dramas from the 70's, which I have not seen. And then there's Survival Quest, which, one might argue, is the weirdest movie on Coscarelli's resume by virtue of it not being weird at all. Two groups of people board a chartered plane; one group is a half dozen regular folk (well, five and a convict on a prison release program) headed for a four-week excursion with a self-help survivalist guru, where they will climb mountains, cross rivers, live off the land, and hopefully experience positive life epiphanies in the process. The other group is a private militia led by a sadistic lunatic who abuses his enrollees. Survival Quest is about what happens when these two groups cross paths and clash. Survival Quest stands out from the rest of Coscarelli's work for how damned positive it is. I don't mean positive in a smiley-happy-people kind of way; I mean that the movie's themes of inner strength, teamwork, and personal growth are so prevalent, Survival Quest might as well be sponsored by the company that makes all those black-border inspirational posters. I don't mean that as a criticism, just an observation. One member a young woman from a well-to-do family and on the brink of getting married; one is an older man looking to recapture the spirit of youth; one is a divorcee whose sense of self-worth has been shattered and she's looking to find herself again; one is a convict assigned to the group as part of his sentence. There's two other guys who only seem to be there for kicks, but one is a smart aleck and a coward, and the other turns out to be a chauvinist, so they have unintended issues to work out. An hour of this movie's run time is mostly devoted to them hiking, climbing, crossing canyons and rivers, and learning to work together as a team from their leader/guru. It's all very positive and affirming. It's nice, but it also feels empty. I quickly got the feeling that nobody would ever fail at anything here, so there isn't much in the way of stakes to the movie. Couple that with how many times they cut away to the militia and the abusive drill instructor is singling out one guy, and you can see where things are going to go, but it keeps not going there, and it feels like the movie is inhibiting itself from kicking into the next gear. When it finally happened -- when the two groups cross paths and become hostile -- a full hour of the ninety minutes of this movie have run. The militia has guns with live ammo and pseudo-military training, the survivalists have their wits. It makes for a fun cat-and-mouse sequence, but it feels way too late, like the movie skipped over a second act and went straight from a super-long first and right to the third. Weirder still is that when the guy the instructor abused takes over the militia, he manages to convince most of them to kill EVERYONE in the survivalist group. They go from wannabe soldiers to a commando death squad hunting civilians with minimal provocation. It feels like this movie is missing a lot of crucial footage that makes the third act make sense. This sense of missing material even extends to the over-long first act; why is Cheryl (the divorcee) so physically fragile and emotionally broken? What is Olivia (the young lady) hoping to find on this trip? Why is Joey (the smart aleck) even here when he seems to be afraid of things that would be included in the brochure? There's not a lot of time to explore everyone's backstory or motivations; the ones that get any kind of arc get a minimal one. The ones that don't get a personality trait hung on them like a sign around their neck and that's it. If it sounds like I'm down on Survival Quest, it's only because it could've been so much better. The pieces of a really good movie are here, but something about the proportions is out of whack. Maybe a couple less characters, and better use of the movie's time (and a little more time, in fact) would've made this so much better. As is, it's beautifully shot and the overall message is nice, and I enjoyed it, but I could've enjoyed it more.