If there’s one thing I love more than procedural police fiction in which writers use current events as an outline for scripts, it’s horror movies. Not many are very good, yet bad horror movies are much more fun to watch than shitty comedies or shitty Holocaust dramas. In the malaise-filled days during my college education, most nights I’d watch some horror movie on NetFlix over a few (many) screwdrivers with my roommates. The quiet desperation post-college days follow much the same pattern, only now it’s likelier I’ll watch Halloween 6: Whatever alone at 4 AM. Still over many screwdrivers. In honor of the spookiest of months, every week in October I’m going to watch a lousy flick that purports to be scary and highlight what’s risible and interesting about. Each week will have a different theme, this inaugural installment being man vs. society, that societal institution being cannibalism. Yep, Donner Pass, available to watch instantly on NetFlix. You’d be better off watching the Donner Party conversation in The Shining on a loop that lasts 90 minutes than this horseshit.

Chances screenwriter thought History is a villain not unlike Blackbeard or Dracula: 109%

Let it be known the film starts with a production company logo animation that consists of a stick figure man skateboarding on a half pipe. It is only my sense of professionalism that kept me from shutting it off there and writing instead about the episode of Fresh Prince where Carlton accidentally takes speed. Donner Pass begins with an old timey prologue that sports more facial hair than an episode of Hell on Wheels and Deadwood combined. Contrary to “facts”, George Donner brutalized people in order to get some human meat from them. Cut to present day. Like a lot of horror, this legend is told by a white jackass seeking to scare people, but Final Girl Kayley isn’t having it. “I did a report about it in the 8^th grade”, she says. An 8^th grade report about a pioneering journey 150 years ago is in fact more accurate than Donner Pass. That the same character disputes the Donner Party cannibalism claim by saying half of Iceland believes in gnomes, well, whatever. (Rather watch some Icelandic Gnomesploitation, honestly…) Kayley, her boyfriend, her cousin and the softspoken awkward kid Thomas who’s offered up his parents’ cabin for a fun weekend comprise the lead characters in Donner Pass. The actors are largely nobodies who showed up on Teen Wolf for a time. The “host”, Thomas, portrays a main character on the upcoming Kevin Williamson waste of time Stalker. I’m happy he’s already lined up something worse than this garbage.

Flashbacks to 150+ years ago are easy for the set dressers, because they just have to make things look as shitty as possible.

The thing about horror is it’s a conservative genre. At every juncture, the correct choice is not experiencing something new. Stay at home. Don’t have sex. Never trust an outsider. Back to one, not forward to anything. Donner Pass doesn’t contradict this premise, as the downfall of the irritating characters stems from taking a trip to a cabin and not choices made in their regular life. A new environment seals their fate. Enough snow happens to strand them there in the Sierra Nevada (where the Donner Party was, in the one of maybe three facts the film found it its “research”). A cop issues a warning they fail to heed; a killer by the name of Epstein (all Jews are automatically killers due to their involvement in Christ’s death) is on the loose, accused of mangling a comely lass. In an unnecessary decision from a narrative standpoint, another even more annoying group of characters show up and force themselves on the cabin. Look, movie, the four characters you started out with are unlikable and shitty; there’s no reason for the additional gross white people squad, unless there are inventive, well-staged deaths involving them… yeah, there aren’t. If everyone relented from underage drinking and stayed home, they’d all survive and more importantly this fucking piece of shit would never happen.

The true horror will come for whomever has to clean up after irresponsible fucks drinking terrible beer the next morning.

It’s not a good sign when the first death comes around and you’re confused as to what happened. Based on the storytelling the director offered, someone threw a blood tomato at a car’s windshield and this caused the driver to die. If a script’s unreadable garbage, it has to compensate with novel gore or at least something to separate it from every other piece of shit. Donner Pass fails hard. I’ve read better drafts of Freddy vs. Jason. The only credit it deserves is quickly introducing a new group of moronic douchebags in a naked attempt to make us care about the first version of the moronic douchebag core. They gave me bad flashbacks to my college years, in which either me or my roommate had to go “okay, you’ve had your fun, now get the fuck out” to some person who imbibed enough to cross the Rubicon. A scene of a snowball drinking game is neither fun nor interesting, and the character development it fosters consists of “viewer, you’ll seek their death”. If not for bad writing that consciously reminds you of character names I’d just call them “Asshole A”, “Asshole B”, “Asshole With Backwards Baseball Cap”, etc.

In the Horror Handbook, “oblivious pissing” is in the section titled “How To Make Your Horror Movie Bad”.

Donner Pass is surprisingly shaggy for something that runs 86 minutes. It takes a long while to get going and features a number of useless subplots that don’t really go anywhere or elucidate anything. Like the rape plot. Yes, there’s a rape plot. One needs a certain finesse when depicting rape in fiction, and Donner Pass is as adept at doing that as it is everything else. Nicole screaming she doesn’t want to be touched when Thomas accidentally does so in the backseat pays off when she reveals to her boyfriend that one of his friends raped her at a party a few weeks back. What does it add to the story? Nothing. Does it develop the characters? No. Does anyone become sympathetic as a result of a rape flashback? Of course not. I imagine the screenwriter noticed the draft came about 20 pages shorter than expected and rushed to think of a way to add something without fucking with the structure. “Oh, I know, a rape!” Like Ernest Hemingway always said, sexual assault is the writer’s safety net.

You may have noticed that I’ve made little to no mention of the Donner Party. Well, I’m only being accurate to Donner Pass, which would be more accurate if retitled Assholes Murdered in Background While Asshole Pisses In Foreground: The Motion Picture. Given Epstein is pretty much only shown in the background with a closeup after he’s been killed, despite being played by John “Cryptkeeper” Kassir, one can expect a twist. The quiet kid nobody knows, who doesn’t engage in the beer drinking and nonconsensual sex all the kids love, turns out to be a 150+ year old eternally youthful cannibal. In this version of cannibal mythos, drinking the blood of another person turns you into a 28 Days Later zombie, proving the opinion I’ve held for quite some time: blood transfusions bring about the end of the human race. Thomas (soon to be on Kevin Williamson’s latest misogynistic piece of shit Stalker!) needs to feed on live flesh every so often or else he’ll die or age or, really, it’s not well explained in spite of him giving a long speech to his tied up captive explaining what the fuck went on in Donner Pass. The Final Girl spends the climax hanging upside down, only freed by her boyfriend who sacrifices himself so that his girlfriend can live to be carted off in an ambulance and freaked out by Exposition Cop saying they only found one body. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll turn up.” Because if there’s one thing the ending needed, it was an assurance/threat that there could be a sequel.

He’s lived countless lives, all of them as a total dork.

Poorly shot and incapable of rendering effective tension, Donner Pass is the kind of movie that allows the following dialogue exchange to happen: “I think I saw someone.” “A person?” If someone in real life responded to the first line with the second line they’d still have a handprint across their face. I’d say its saving grace is the length, but on NetFlix you can now watch David Cronenberg’s Shivers – a much more unsettling, creepy and atmospheric horror film – and it’s only a minute longer. Its odd perspective that the transformative change from human to zombie is not inherently a bad thing shows that David Cronenberg has more ideas in his toenail clippings than these shitheads have in their entirety. But hey, Donner Pass differs from most horror (or most movies, really) in that the director is a woman (Elise Robertson, “Outraged Woman” in an episode of FlashForward). A woman having the opportunity to direct a tone deaf rape scene is an important step in the march towards equality.

strong female character, doo doo doo doo doo

There’s really nothing to recommend with this 86 minute long affront to intelligence, so I suggest watching Shivers. Donner Pass doesn’t even work as a “watch it with your friends, drink, laugh at the shittiness” because so much of it is dull, taking a long time to set up something neither thrilling nor particularly entertaining. The writer may’ve wanted to make some point about navigating high school and spending time with people you don’t even like to get something out of them (alcohol, drugs, etc.), but they sure as hell didn’t know what point that was. During Thomas’ interminable “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” speech, he says “we all become the thing we hate”. It’s true that eventually people who don’t want to eat people become a Wendigo assembled on a budget of nothing but false hope and delusion. I’ll give them that.