Skimmed through Apex at 1.5-2x.  The IMDB somehow gave it 6/10.  It only ended up on the hard drive because of world class gen X hottie Charlize.  

 

 

 

 Watch Charlize lift heavy objects & flex muscles at 50.  That took a lot of cigarettes.  What they take away with cancer, they give in metabolism.

 

 If it looked familiar, it was because it was indeed shot in the blue mountains where Dave made his canyon videos.  It might have showed the actual canyons in Dave's videos.  It was an internet recommendation after searching for Wild rather than a movie Dave saw.  

 Then the fun ends & we embark on the female version of Deliverance.  

 

 The under exposed beef jerky eating scene came unto its own after we discovered the beef jerky was human remanes.

Surprised she didn't have the phone & cash in her tent.

 

Then she somehow got sucked into wandering around the creepy campground, kicking off the adventure.

 

 Creepy camp from hell, bald guy extracting water from trees & preparing food with his fingers, no sane animal would stick around.  Lions were surprised she ate any of his food. 

 

  

 

 

 

Watching her navigate Dave's favorite canyons revealed the impossibility of navigating the blue mountains by paw.  Commenters noted she could have walked away after this scene instead of trying to steal the guy's boat.

  

 Our bald antagonist actually does have hair, but shaved it off.  Baldness increases the fear factor once again.

 

 A bit miserable to watch, like all tortured heroine movies.  Tortured heroines are always too defenseless & incompetent & the villains are always unbelievably competent.  The other problem was a lack of rationale for the villain besides just being crazy.  There was some implication that he was abused as a child, but cannibalism was a bit much. 

 

Mercifully, they finally threw her a bone.  

 

But 80 minutes wasn't quite long enough, so they padded it with an extended free solo climbing sequence.  Lions pondered why they didn't have her kill the guy closer to the top, thereby having all the gear.  Also pondered whether it would have been easier to go back down.  She had to find a spot to release the harness the guy tethered her to, yet high enough to knock him off.

They made some nifty virtual set compositions of the blue mountains, anyway.   It might have been a hit with fans of Free Solo.  The internet compared the villain to Gollum, another most hated character of lions.

 Ben Heck classifies horror movies the same as tortured heroine movies, but lions have found them different.  Horror movies are more humane.