THE FORCE ON THUNDER MOUNTAIN (1978)
Article 3915 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-23-2012
Posting Date: 5-3-2012
Directed by Peter B. Good
Featuring Christopher Cain, Todd Dutson, Borge West
Country: USA
What it is: Your chance to see stock footage

A man takes his son on a camping trip to hike to Thunder Mountain. Many animals are encountered. A UFO is seen. Strange things happen.

This is one of those movies that seems to be an experiment on how little you can have happen during a movie and still call it a movie. About ninety percent of the movie is banal dialogue, hiking scenes, and animal stock footage. Sporadically, something mysterious happens, but except for a sequence where the hikers vanish from the forest and end up in a desert, the mysterious happenings are incredibly tepid. Eventually the movie works itself up to revealing the secret of Thunder Mountain, and though I’m tempted to call the revelation disappointing, the truth of the matter is that my expectations were so low by this time that the movie would have to have worked pretty hard to lower them any further. The movie has a rating of 1.6 on IMDB, and I’d say that’s pretty accurate. If I myself found the movie a bit on the painless side, that’s only because I have a weak spot for animal footage. If you don’t, then you’ll probably want to avoid this one like the plague.