I didn’t know what I was getting into with Beacon Point. Given the fact that it takes place on a forested mountain trail, I thought for sure I was in for a creature feature. What I got instead was a mash up of genres that seemed like a student film which tried to fit all of the ideas they had into a single movie. Though that sounds a bit harsh, I didn’t hate the movie, I only disliked it a little. In fact, there were many aspects of Beacon Point that I thoroughly enjoyed.
First of all, I watch a lot of direct to video horror movies, and I have to say that the quality of this movie is high for its status. I was genuinely surprised at how clear the video and audio were in this film. The acting isn’t bad either. There are no big names or even faces that I could recognize, but they all did a great job with their roles, and there wasn’t a single weak link that made it seem like this was their first acting gig.
The real fault in this movie is that it struggles to pin down a theme. For the first half of the movie, they allude to a movie that is more about human nature and how we act when we get away from civilization. Then, halfway through the movie, they throw a curveball so sharp that it is genuinely confusing. You will find yourself asking if you missed a scene leading up to the reveal of the antagonists. They then reel back a bit before the movie gets weird.
Without revealing too much, Beacon Point borders on science fiction with an extraterrestrial presence and futuristic technology. There are many elements of the movie that could be better explained, but they spend a lot of time talking about the past and not enough time explaining what is going on in the present. The parts that they do explain are not explained with much clarity and leave you guessing more than understanding. Even the ending leaves you questioning just what was going on the whole time.
What Beacon Point did well, and should have kept doing, was study human nature. It was fairly interesting to watch the group with different backgrounds, one of which is keeping a big secret, interact outside of the environments which the characters would traditionally be comfortable. They could have left out the antagonists, and this possibly would have been a better movie. Alas, that was not the case, and the movie suffered for it.
I wish I had more positive things to say about Beacon Point because the truth is that I didn’t hate this movie. My slight dislike is probably partially my fault because I just assumed that I would be seeing Bigfoot or a werewolf instead of the villain that they went with. Enter this movie with an open mind and a decent attention span, and you may get a little more out of it than I did. I am going to recommend this movie, even though I didn’t love it, because I think that there is an audience out there that will enjoy it.
Beacon Point comes to Video On Demand May 2, 2017.