Another Kind

Expected this to be yet another tedious "found footage" movie but was pleasantly surprised to find that not the case. Does an admirable job of building mood, altho the characters are basically too stupid to be sympathetic. I mean, you go hiking in the woods without a map or compass? Really? And fall to arguing as soon as you're in the car? Meh. But the overall effectiveness is not greatly diminished by this cliché of genre films. Also affecting the movie is the lack of effective cinematography for a film set in the very scenic Catskill Mountains of New York. However, what is there does work. This was obviously shot on location somewhere it was hilly and wooded, and in the real winter, so that makes up for the otherwise lackluster camera work. The mood is sufficiently weird and creepy to achieve the atmosphere it's going for, and the ending out of left field is pure Twilight Zone stuff. Not a bad hour-and-sixteen minutes.

well when I first checked out this movie the rating was a 6.1 and I personally always try to watch movies over 5 because normally the ones under suck :)

Anyways I read a little bit of the plot first and then I watched the movie trailer and thought huh! it looks kinda good.

so I got the movie and watched it with my bf last night in bed and this movie did the job :) it had me covering half of my face with my blanket and my bf actually watched all the movie till the end 4 him is really rare because he is really really hard to please :)

so I don't understand why is this movie is getting a low rating really? give it a chance!

Acting was a bit poor, but a creepy atmosphere made this film watchable

Just had to watch this because I'm hooked on survival-theme movies. Maybe I had passed it if I had noticed it was one of those movies with a "mystery" element. It's hard enough to do a decent survival movie without any extra themes and true enough, this movie might had been at least decent as a strict survival movie.

Everything starts promising enough. Two friends with their girlfriends leave a city for snow hiking in the forests. Soon enough however the mystery element comes to play and the movie fails instantly. There are several occasions where something irrational and not so subtle stuff happens. One of the guys is just constantly trying to convince the others that's not a big deal. Perhaps some hillbillies are playing pranks etc. and he succeeds every time! This is one of the major flaws in the movie and such a typical fail that it's very annoying. Nobody in their right mind would sleep comfortably and wait some new weird stuff to just happen in dark woods without giving it a second thought. Instead they would get back to their car as fast as possible even if it was only some hillbillies having fun at their expense. But no, they have to wait until parasites begin drilling into their skulls before they're convinced it's probably safer to get back home.

So why did we need the mystery element here? Probably the writer / director realized he didn't have any new ideas for a survival movie and thought he could get off the hook by adding the mystery element. Very few movies in the genre have anything new to add, but I still rather watch another unoriginal realistic movie than a stupid one that's not even funny (unlike The Core which is hilarious). If you find some guilty pleasure from survival movies, then there are much better options you might have not seen yet from The Poseidon Adventure to Open Water and 127 Hours and many more in between.

Released in 2013, "Another Kind" details events when four friends take a four-day snowshoeing hike in the Catskills and experience strange occurrences.

This is a micro-budget small film, reportedly only costing $120,000, but it's so competently made it comes across as a bigger movie. It basically takes "The Blair Witch Project" template and makes a better movie. The four actors are all convincing and the dialogue, which might seem to contain a little too much bickering, is fairly realistic (I've been on trips with couples who frequently argue, so I know it happens). The first half hour is pretty humdrum, but then the events and filmmaking magic take you into the story. I almost never get creeped-out during movies, but a few parts of "Another Kind" were seriously creepy. Unlike some mystery movies that keep everything a mystery at the end, "Another Kind" spells it out, which will be a turn-off to some and a good thing to others.

The film is short-and-sweet at 76 minutes and was shot in Catskill Mountains, New York, with the opening filmed in Brooklyn.

GRADE: B

***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further if you haven't seen the movie)

The ending reveals that there's an extraterrestrial attack on earth, so how does this explain the eerie events that the hikers experience. Evidently, the aliens assigned to this particular sector were toying with the hikers, like a cat with a mouse. They were just having some good sport with these easily-conquered low-life humans.