This movie is so badly written that it begins right in the middle. Something bad has happened and there's zero explanation, zero exploration, and absolutely no build up or tension. I had to check my DVD twice to make sure the player didn't start in the middle but surely enough, the writers just start so abruptly that I felt like there should have at least been ten minutes of some sort of clarification of what we're exactly looking at. The Donner party (I'm assuming) have looked down on the remains of... something, and this signals that they've opened the gates of hell... because... you know what? I'd love to keep going but I can't. "Necrosis" is such a mind-boggling sloppily written mess, I barely understood anything that was happening here from minute one. So because this has opened the gates of hell (why are the gates of hell opened by the Donner Party?) in modern times a hapless brood of mismatched travelers happen upon the mountain range the Donner Party perished in and the shit hits the fan. The shit being this movie, and the fan being the viewer. The travelers who end up at a ski resort find themselves being hunted by the Donner Party ghouls who intend to hack them up and eat them, all the while we're treated to a lame cameo by Michael Berryman and a rather piss poor performance from 80's pop star Tiffany mugging it for the camera on more than one occasion.
 

She gives probably the most horrendous performance of the bunch with lines like: "Oh-Michael-I-just-had-the-scariest-dream." Ouch. Meanwhile the writers never quite know how to construct any kind of competent story. The structure is painfully disjointed, we jump from one sub-plot to another in a vain attempt to garner some form of extrapolation in to these individuals and these characters are so utterly obnoxious they don't even seem to like each other.

It's pretty much just a really bad cast walking in to one another delivering some truly clunky dialogue. The cast have zero chemistry with one another. We only know about them what the writers feel would add to some depth and they pull back in time to allow us to not feel anything when they're murdered by the ghouls. One man is an aspiring novelist, one girl is a wannabe photographer, and James Kyson-Lee who you may remember from "Heroes" is the obligatory comic relief whose own stupidity and idiocy never makes for anything remotely comedic about him. He's also given a sub-plot with a girl he's in a relationship with who reminisces about their past constantly and nags him about his tendency to drink a lot thus contradicting all efforts his comic relief character has to offer. And then they pretty much deliver the entire concept to the audience in the middle instead of letting the story play out for itself. Rather than allowing us to discover what's going to happen, we have to sit and watch the characters talk to one another about the Donner Party and the legend of the travelers that haunt the resort they conveniently know by heart.

All the while the director never quite sucks us in to the story with editing that's badly chopped up, really bad stunt work, and--get this--CGI snowfall! Don't get me wrong I wasn't ready to dislike this movie. Judging by the premise and the cover art, I thought "Necrosis" would be a fun splatter flick I could breeze through, but it takes every chance at pure moronic proportions that I just could not sit through it without rolling my eyes. One girl is nearly dragged in to a snow bank and can't explain what it was that tried to, token minority character Jerry sees a ghost and tells no one about it in spite of hearing the legend about the ghosts later on, and oh yeah: their cell phones will not work on the mountains so any chance of them getting to civilization is rendered conveniently futile. The rest of the movie revolves around wacky dream sequences, endless dialogue about characters seeing horrific images without ever actually letting the audience in on the fun and once we finally get down to the splatter fest, it's just so anti-climactic and yawn inducing. If this is the best they can do with the Donner Party legend, then it's about time to let this story rest in peace until someone creative can tap it.