Review: The Curse of Wolf Mountain – “The folk horror mountain man-killer mask design is pretty cool”

Available on digital and on-demand from the 9th of May, The Curse of Wolf Mountain is directed by David Lipper (Death Link), written by Keli Price (On Thin Ice), and stars Price, Lipper, Danny Trejo (Machete), Tobin Bell (Saw) and stand-up Matt Rife.

AJ (Price) has been doing regression therapy with his psychiatrist (Bell) to try and get to the bottom of who forced his parents to jump off Wolf Mountain to their deaths when he was a child. The doc recommends AJ go back to the mountain to see if anything else shakes loose and he heads there with his girlfriend, brother Max (Lipper), friend James (Rife) and assorted girlfriends.

MEANWHILE. A bank robbery has occurred and the two robbers (one of whom is obvs Danny Trejo) are hiding out on the mountain. Both groups collide and must try to survive while being picked off by a masked maniac as we get closer to the truth of what happened to AJ’s parents all those years ago.

I love Danny Trejo, but he pulls his standard two scenes and a death schtick here – because he’s playing a bad guy. That’s not a spoiler, it’s literally his own rule. Tobin Bell also does two scenes, but cheekily one of his is even a taped Zoom call. They are both fun and hamming it up when they are on screen but they do also serve to highlight how poor the performances across the rest of the board are, except for Rife who leans hard into being a two-brain cell douche and spends the majority of his screen time shagging in a sleeping bag. Fair.

It’s a wise move because there’s not an awful lot going on on Wolf Mountain apart from characters getting lost and wandering around trying to get mobile phone reception for very, very long periods of time. Waiting for a kill, any kill, is gruelling and everything from the PowerPoint slide title treatment to the astoundingly obvious and awful-looking day-for-night shooting is cheap as chips and dull as heck.

The folk horror mountain man-killer mask design is pretty cool if sorely underused and the end features an actually decent twist and one of the best worst uses of a dummy ever – on Wolf Mountain you get your kicks where you can.

The Curse of Wolf Mountain is available on digital and on-demand from the 9th of May.