Review of The Last Winter (2006) by Brody M — 09 Oct 2009

When it comes to atmosphere, this film is a tanker truck's worth of fresh air breaths. No, we don't have to set our horror flick in the woods on the dark side of the moon. No, we don't have to be out in the vast prairie countryside where cannibalistic special needs children are given sharp things and told to fixate on the purtiness of one's mouth. Want a vast yet claustrophobic while overbearingly bleak setting? How about the endless taiga? Remember how much spookier The Thing was when there was literally nowhere to go even if you could escape? Almost anything done, say, on a video tape left for your friends to discover at a later time, is going to be infinitely creepier just because of the location.

That being said, this has got to be one of the only movies I've seen that actually lacks anything else to run with. Ron Pearlman drinks and yells at people, isolation does it's trick to people, every so often things explode, and we are left playing the timeless zero sum game of "wendigo or ten thousand year old mystery spores" twilight zone who-dun-it which I imagine is a good deal like learning how to tongue-kiss with a chupacabra.

In the end, astonishingly, I came away from this movie dying to see more of the nihilistic cabin fever while remaining indifferent at best to almost all other aspects of the work.