This movie starts out quiet and very low key. And that is an overstatement.

We open with a man paddling a canoe towards three bikini clad women enjoying drinks on a beach. The women are just enjoying a brief getaway until he approaches asking if he can take a break on their beach. Any tension is broken by the charm of the boater, Mitch, who gives a ten second life story that ends with him mentioning he was at a concert recently. Happens to be a concert one of the girls, April, had also been at. She then realizes that he is the singer form the concert they were discussing and the two others pulling up in a second canoe are the rest of the band, Liz a female drummer and Eric a guitarist.

The girls agree to let the band, Sled Dog, set up camp there with them for the night. This leads to April making a snap decision to leave her friends and join the band for their 5 day trek to a cabin.

Questionable decision. Absolutely. But they are in Canada, and I suppose you can always default to Canadians are over/y nice, so why not abandon your friends to be a camping groupie for a week! Questionable decisions are exacerbated when the psychedelic drug Acid is added to the mix. They have a plan, do a hit every night when they make camp. The plan is to try and amp up their creative juices. Artistically the band has been a bit of a one hit wonder with their debut, but their second album flopped. They need to turn things around.

But on the third day of their trek April develops a massive headache. So bad that her forehead is physically bruised and distended. Until it pops! And not in a good way, as she keels over. Dead.

My instant thought was this band is screwed. What do they do? Leave her? That likely doesn’t end well as her friends will point out the band as having taken her. Take her dead body with them? That’s kinda awkward since they still have 3 days on the water before they get to the cabin. 

To make matters worse, Mitch is convinced that he is seeing someone in the woods. Figures that are watching them. 

Turns out that what is watching them isn’t a drug fueled figment of his imagination. The creatures look like a sort of Predator/Alien hybrid that speak in an indecipherable, guttural language.

This movie has a Lovecraftian feel to it. The dread feeling of the unknown. The realization that the unknown is something you can’t overcome. If it comes for you, there’s no escape. Any faux escape is just temporary as the creatures are always lurking.

If you are someone who likes a nice tidy bow wrapped around your stories, this isn’t the movie for you. What are these creatures? No clue. It isn’t explained because there is nobody in the story who has the knowledge base to try and figure it out. And when we get to the end of the movie, things are even more uncertain.

I would love a deeper dive into the lore of this movie. But we don’t get that. Hell, think about Cthulhu. In our world, he is about to turn 100. But we know almost nothing about him. We got about 12,000 words from Lovecraft in the story Call of Cthulhu. And a few other mentions. But no real explanation. Many authors since then have given their deeper explorations of Cthulhu, but they didn’t really know the intent of Lovecraft and the potential backstory. In Archons we are left with a similar situation. These dark and mysterious creatures clearly have a back story waiting to be explored. The movie came out almost a decade ago, and there hasn’t been any publicly announced intent on returning to the story.

As a lover of the unknown, this movie is my kind of movie. Hell, I watched the last 20 minutes three times. This gets a 10 star from me. I plan on ordering a DVD copy of it for my shelf. One peculiar “knock” against this movie I saw was that there was a lot of cigarette smoking in it. Which seems like such a weird thing to care about. They do Acid in the movie. Why would smoking be such an issue? People in life smoke. And do drugs. And apparently are sometimes stalked by mysterious creatures that murder them. Hopefully these creatures stay in Canada and don’t try to immigrate to Missouri.