Whiskey Mountain

When a movie becomes successful and Hollywood decides it needs to crank out 100 more of them, it rarely works out. All the “_____ from hell” movies in the 90’s that came our after The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (the secretary from hell in The Temp, the teenage girl from hell in The Crush), or wannabe Star Wars clones, or the Halloween ripoffs. Another example from the 70’s is the backwoods rape/revenge horror movie. The success of Deliverance — four buddies on a canoeing trip are tortured by rednecks — set the stage for all sorts of clones. The reprehensible I Spit On Your Grave would swap out for city guys with one beautiful woman, and features a rape scene clocking in at a third of the movie’s 90 minute runtime. This movie makes the victims two couples, and the aggressors a group of backwoods drug dealers. What this movie does real well is capture the beauty of nature in North Carolina. And the one scene of rape is not actually shown (it’s suggested through Polaroids and heard, and it’s only 30 seconds), which is an improvement over some movies in this genre. And that’s where the positives stop. Whiskey Mountain is inept and misguided in almost every way imaginable, a pale copy of a copy of a copy of Deliverance. 60 minutes pass before the couples encounter the drug dealers. 60. Whole. Minutes. Before this movie decides to plot. In that time, you’re treated to several LOOOOOOOONG shots of motocross in the woods and pointless conversations. Tension isn’t so much built as dripped like an IV on the lowest setting; the dealers try to scare them off with strategically placed fires on the far side of their camp! They steal the panties of one of the women! TERROR! FEAR! If you’re not bored to tears by this point, then you get the absolutely moronic third act. I guess because it’s a movie about rednecks and the south, they gotta have country music. But when there’s a chase scene involving the heroes on dirt bikes and the bad guys in a Jeep with shotguns, up tempo, shit-kickin’ fiddle music ain’t right. It isn’t tense at all; it sounds like square dance music. Somehow, the third act feels longer than the first two, despite having all the action. The final shootout is laughable for so many reasons; shotguns randomly become pinpoint accurate at distances of 50 feet when they need to be. The violence — half the draw of an exploitation film — is so antiseptic, it feels like a TV movie. Editing is done by a chef at a Benihana. There’s no tension or horror or anything, just a feeling of hitting pre-ordained beats. And the final shot is so infuriating, it renders the entire movie pointless. Worst of all, it’s just BORING. Crushingly, unbelievably BORING. You won’t feel anything watching this movie aside from the grim hand of death approaching ever closer as you waste 90 precious minutes of your life. Watch grass grow. Watch paint dry. Watch a 2000’s Dane Cook “comedy” special. Don’t watch this. Hooptober 2022 #4/31