Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979)
(Hukkunud Alpinisti’ hotell)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1,500 cinematizens.
Genre: Mash-up of sy fy and krimi; Species: Estonian.
Verdict: oddly intriguing
Tagline: Big in Tallinn.
Ten little Reds are isolated by an avalanche that cuts off the mountain hotel, as the first guest gets murdered. The copper who is spending the night there puts his square jaw to work.
The hotel has its exotic name from a previous avalanche that killed a skier. Subtle, not. More dead are on the way.
The guests are the usual assortment at the castle of Otranto. A rock climber who climbs the hotel walls while boasting of his work on a top secret project. A vamp with a wig. An industrialist with a gut. A blow-in with bad hair. A St Bernard dog that carries luggage. A recluse. A young couple, she with huge dark glasses at all times and he dead very soon. She of the dark glasses finds the death of her paramour amusing and smokes dope to console herself.
Are these people decadent westerners? They must be since all the signs in the hotel are in French. I cannot take them as representatives of the Soviet Union in 1979, just before the Russian war in Afghanistan when the Cold War got hot again. There is a dance scene, or maybe it is group electro-convulsive shock therapy session that surely is western corruption. Further evidence of western decadence is that the note passed to the police officer is in French made up of letters and words cut from publications. That cutting and pasting would have taken hours. Only a decadent western would have that much idle time. Did the Swiss St Bernard dog do it? Hint – French is spoken in them there Alps.
Spoiler alert!
It’s cryptic but I think it goes like this. Two aliens with two androids, all disguised as decadent westerners, are holed up in this remote hotel while their spaceship – built by the low bid contractor – gets repaired. They had earlier fallen among some criminals who have since pursued them for…? Stardust. So the aliens want to hide at this obscure Hôtel du Nord until the ETD to elude the crims.
The aliens were Gut man and She of the dark glasses. The droids were their respective paramours, wig woman and dead lad who is undead because it is hard to kill a droid.
Cop does not believe any of this guff and calls in a helicopter gunship to blast them. They get blasted. The end. Maybe they were and may be they weren’t aliens. Either way they are dust now. If only it had been that easy in Afghanistan.
The film moves between brilliant white light of the snowfields to inky noir inside the hotel. The soundtrack is eerie, and the hotel itself is almost a character in its sharp angles and dead-ends. The credits say it is an Estonian production filmed on location in Kazakhstan. It is my second look at Kazakhstan in one week.
What I found in the recesses of the web was an East German release.