The Force on Thunder Mountain (1978) – Peter B. Good.

With their loyal pooch Jake in tow, a kindly father and son's bonding hiking trip up Thunder Mountain takes a decidedly tweaked turn into the realms of shamanic 70s Sci-fi when they eerily encounter an apparently hostile, manifestly alien force! The two conspicuously wholesome leads are sympathetically drawn, and the bucolic scenery, plenitude of cutesy animal footage recalls the similarly off-beat nature of cult backwoods slasher Prey, and I'm fairly certain that I've seen the neat-o UFO FX and Indian petroglyphs reused on Ancient Aliens! Overall, the film is enjoyable, and competently made, with an endearingly folksy vibe, some spectacular vistas, and the Twilight Zone'd sequence in the deserted town proving most effective. During one conspicuously expository scene, a character pointedly remarked that his unnerved companion was experiencing 'rock fever', which may well prove to be the very first reference to the future scourge of crack cocaine! In closing, it would have been lovely if The Force on Thunder Mountain had been a legitimate documentary, as I welcome the idea of 1000 year old stoner Ohm and his mushroomoid thought translator being real. The sense of the scriptwriter having previously experimented with psychoactive manna seems entirely plausible, since the sky-high narrative is woozily inflected with lysergic interludes, and the glaring omission that Big Foot didn't beam down from his pan-dimensional conveyance is, perhaps, the film's only real flaw.

'May The Force on Thunder Mountain be with you.'