Review of The Last Winter (2006) by Amanda W — 13 Apr 2009

Larry Fessenden is a hack. There's no other way to put it. There's an interesting concept here, but it's hard to imagine worse execution. It's a classic example of two wildly different movies being mashed together without rhyme or reason. Even worse, both halves are completely inept.

The opening hour is the slow build up. Let's highlight the word SLOW. Why is it slow? Mostly because the transitions are so choppy that you take another minute or two to adjust to the scene chance. Plus many of the inserted scenes amount to nothing, so you quickly stop caring. Using a bunch of one note characters who are, of course, forced to interact in the sort of isolated space that may as well be lifted directly from a deep sea, or deep space, or any other cheap genre picture doesn't help. So that's the first hour. Boring. Chopping. Annoying actors (especially Perlman) doing banal things.

Then it turns into a rushed, incomprehensible horror movie. There's never a sense of palpable danger. It's a case of random creepy things happening to people who make stupid decisions. But since you never cared about them in the first place, you won't care if the cgi ghost of a fossil-- or as the director so eloquently describes them-- the beasties get them.

At first I was shocked that some major critics rated this highly. Then I remembered. Most of them don't understand genre films to begin with. It should come as no surprise that they dismiss the interesting examples and heap praise on the "ambitious" failure. Let's end on that note- FAILURE.