Vanished in Yosemite (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 26) at 8 Lifetime showed a “premiere” movie called Vanished in Yosemite, which I watched with relatively low expectations, probably because it was presented as a follow-up to the 2022 Lifetime movie Disappearance in Yellowstone (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/05/disappearance-in-yellowstone-johnson.html). Both films were made by the same studio, Johnson Production Group, but by different writers and directors: Disappearance in Yellowstone was directed by Tony Dean Smith from a script by Paul A. Birkitt, while Vanished in Yosemite was both written and directed by Doug Campbell (though a woman whose name escapes me was listed alongside him as co-author of the original story). Vanished in Yosemite actually turned out to be a better movie than Disappearance in Yellowstone, though alas I had to piece together information about it from various Web sites because imdb.com didn’t have a page for it yet. It’s about two sisters, Jennifer (Skye Coyne) and Katrina (Kelcie Stranahan) Stewart, who decide to take a vacation in Yosemite National Park. Only Jennifer is a control freak who has them scheduled practically to the minute, while Katrina is more footloose and easy-going. Katrina is also, shall we say, a lot freer with her affections towards men than Jennifer.

The opening night of their stay Katrina is cruised by Rick Edgewood (Rob LaColla) at the restaurant at the Buena Vista Hotel, where she and Jennifer are staying. Rick says he’s a photographer for a climate action group who’s in Yosemite to take pictures to show how human-caused climate change is affecting its environment, and he’s got a camera with a very long white telephoto lens to prove it. Rick invites Katrina to go hiking with him the next morning; Jennifer insists on coming along, but the next morning she’s suffering from food poisoning and so Rick and Katrina go off alone together. The film began with an elaborate prologue in which a woman is shown sleeping on a bed in the middle of the great outdoors – the bed is equipped with a matching dresser and mirror – and she’s shown being chased by an unseen assailant shooting arrows at her with a mechanical bow. The significance of this scene doesn’t become apparent until the very end of the film, and through much of the movie I was wondering whether it was a flash-forward, a flashback or a dream sequence. Anyway, Rick and Katrina go off together on their hike, only our suspicions (and Jennifer’s) that he was up to no good are confirmed when he sneaks over to Katrina’s bag and, while she’s conveniently not looking, drops three drops of a knockout drug into her water bottle. Then he reminds her to hydrate, and no sooner has she drunk some of the drugged water than she starts to fade out of consciousness. Eventually she goes fully under and Rick throws her into the bed of his white pickup truck. When she comes to she finds herself in a shabby old shack on the outskirts of the park, tied to a bed, and Rick explains that she can call for help all she wants but no one will hear her. Rick leaves her alone to get food, and returns with a can of chili, only when he tries to feed it to her she spits it in his face twice.

Meanwhile, Jennifer is convinced her sister has been kidnapped, and she calls her ex-boyfriend Wally (Jason Tobias), whom she broke up with three years earlier after she caught him having extra-relational activity and responded by having an extra-relational affair of her own with a man named Marcos. At first Wally couldn’t be less interested in helping his ex find her sister, but eventually he joins her in Yosemite and the two try to find what happened to her. They have two clues: the site where Rick dumped Katrina’s phone and an Indian bead bracelet he was wearing when Jennifer first saw him. Jennifer makes a series of videos appealing for help finding her sister, which in an intriguing plot twist earns her the ire of Merced Mayor Dan Jefferson, Buena Vista Hotel manager Teresa Williams, and sheriff’s deputy A. James. The latter two are Black, and all three join forces in demanding that Jennifer take down her videos because they’ve spread so far and wide that already the Buena Vista Hotel has had 40 percent of their outstanding bookings cancel on the eve of the busy tourist season. Rick not only cuts the brake line of Wally’s car so it crashes in the park, he also uses his knife to vandalize the room Jennifer and Wally were staying in (in twin beds). Teresa Williams accuses Jennifer and Wally of trashing the room themselves and uses that as an excuse to throw them out of the hotel, and A. James adds to the threat by telling them he’ll arrest them if they return to the park at all. Nonetheless, they do precisely that, and distract A. James by starting a fire in a trash can so they can sneak past him and get back into the park.

They have what appears to be a stroke of luck when a woman named “Miranda Brown,” or something like that, approaches them and said that Rick tried to kidnap her, and she knows where his cabin is. Only [spoiler alert!] “Miranda” is actually Rick’s younger sister and partner in crime, and for an ending Doug Campbell rips off The Most Dangerous Game. Rick and “Miranda” are international big-game hunters who, like General Zaroff in Richard Connell’s oft-filmed story, have got bored hunting traditional game animals and taken to hunting humans instead. Rick takes out Wally by pushing him off a cliff, and he and “Miranda” overpower Jennifer as well as Katrina, after Rick has earlier also knocked off a cute young nature photographer who came upon Katrina in the deserted mountain cabin and tried to rescue her. The film ends as it began, with a bed, dresser and mirror set up in the middle of nature, and Rick and “Miranda” hunting down the terrified Jennifer and Katrina – only Jennifer ducks just in time to miss one of Rick’s arrows, and it lands in “Miranda” instead and kills her. Rick is grief-stricken over having accidentally killed his sister – it’s the one even remotely human moment of his otherwise totally evil portrayal – and this gives Jennifer and Katrina the opportunity they need to beat him to death with two small logs they’ve conveniently found. There’s an epilogue in which Jennifer and Katrina return to Yosemite a year or so later, with Wally in tow – fortunately he landed in a canopy of pine trees so he was merely injured, not killed, and he walks with a limp and needs a cane but should be O.K. long-term as soon as he gets enough physical therapy. Also Jennifer and Katrina have gone back to school – Katrina to become a trauma counselor and Jennifer an M.D. – and Jennifer and Wally have not only become a couple again, but at the end of the movie Jennifer announces she’s pregnant. “Who’s the father?” Katrina asks her snottily, when it’s not that difficult to figure it out.

Despite some silly moments (including a flashback that shows “Miranda” actually spiking Jennifer’s food so she’d get sick and couldn’t resist when Katrina went for her hike with Rick the day he abducted her), Vanished in Yosemite is actually a pretty good Lifetime thriller, and I liked the way Doug Campbell and cinematographer Christopher Jordan counterpointed the sheer natural beauty of Yosemite with the dastardly deeds going on there. There are enough shots of Half Dome and the other natural wonders of the park to qualify this as a nature documentary. Vanished in Yosemite is also relatively well acted, though the scenes of Rick actually holding Katrina hostage are a good deal less interesting than Jennifer’s and Wally’s obsessive quest to find her. Rob LaColla’s performance as Rick is especially chilling, far better than Aren Bucholz’s in the analogous role in Disappearance in Yellowstone: he’s disarming, almost charming, and one could readily imagine oneself falling in love (or at least lust) with him at first sight just as Katrina does: her final text message to Jennifer before her abduction reads, “I think I’m in love!”