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Plot:
In the Arctic region of Northern Alaska, an oil company's advance team struggles to establish a drilling base that will forever alter the pristine land. After one team member is found dead, a disorien...( read more 
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Recent Reviews
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MCT:September 4, 2008Like a modernized remake of "The Thing" that falls between mediocre and just bearable.
If you need a "small team lost in the snow surrounded by supernatural/alien creatures" movie, this has that. The creatures aren't impressive, but some of the acting hits stride at moments. -
MCT:September 3, 2008I found this quite boring and fought to not stop it, as hopedf forsomething interesting to happen. I must have missed someting as I see others very much like it.
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MCT:July 20, 2008I was not expecting this to be anywhere NEAR good. Larry Fessenden directed it and I fucking loathed that self-indulgent piece of shit Wendigo. It looked like ass and was written about as well as you'd expect from someone who sniffs paint. Honestly, my friends and I just picked it up as a laughable horror movie (along with that treasure Marronnier).
But surprise! The Last Winter is a fine film. Not a very strong genre effort, as the movie is pretty thin on the scares until its last 15 or 20 minutes, but it is observant and intelligently written. One may view the environmental messages as a bit heavy, but I looked at them as an allegory for the apocalypse, which is a concept this film deals with very uniquely. Fessenden trusts his viewers' intelligence here, leaving room for implication but providing plenty of compelling narrative bits to nibble on as well. The acting is solid and the characters are fascinatingly restrained - emotional exposition is much more controlled than it was in Wendigo, which was stuffed ad nauseam with HAPPY FAMILY FOOTAGE to better underline the upcoming tragedy.
I think The Last Winter loses a lot of ground with some really fake-looking animal ghosts which were supposed to be spooky but instead took me out of the movie. I know that it's a limitation of the budget, but this movie gave me enough faith in Fessenden's abilities that he could have developed something not as visual. Sure, nature had to strike back somehow, but did it have to do it with shitty CGI deer? -
MCT:July 2, 2008Eternity's a pretty long time. But it quickly becomes an ugly long time when one thinks about how he or she will be spending it (reincarnated, in Heaven or Hell, or in a coffin or an urn). Eternity is so undeniably boundless that the prospect of its endless duration is deeply unsettling (for most people). Nature can have that same uncomforting effect, and, when a motion picture plays off of that effect, the result can be frightening. Take, for example, Antarctica: it's a place of such magnitude and vacancy that its seemingly illimitable emptiness becomes threatening. There are certain regions of Alaska that have been forsaken as Antarctica has, lifeless and expansive plains of snowy oblivion. One of these massive voids provides the setting for The Last Winter. And director Larry Fessenden films it to terrifying results, creating an atmosphere last matched by John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing (which, by no coincidence, took place in Antarctica).
Within the Arctic province of Northern Alaska, gruff, hard-shelled Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) leads an eight-person team of evaluators, which has been sent by the U.S. mainland-based oil company K.I.C. Corporation, whose intent is to survey the Northern Artic National Wildlife Refuge for potential drilling sites. But there's something in the atmosphere that doesn't want them there -- a "driving force," one character desperately explains -- and its presence is eventually felt by everyone in the group.
When the crew's youngest member, Maxwell, claims that he saw something out in the snow, then is found dead days later, fear envelopes in his associates, causing them to question their judgment and sanity. And Hoffman (James LeGros), who's employed by the government rather than K.I.C., to ensure that they're running things as they said they would, insists that he has the answer: hydrogen sulfide (sour gas), which had been frozen beneath the ice for thousands of years, is being released by the rising Arctic temperatures and, consequently, is causing hallucinations. Fessenden, who co-wrote the script with Robert Leaver, provokes intellectual attentiveness from his audience, who must form their own conclusion as the whether or not the chilling events that transpire in his film are the result of an environmental crisis or a supernatural phenomenon.
The Last Winter is unnerving for reasons beyond that which its horror conventions inspire. Its desolation is a key catalyst in its distribution of apprehension, but, for a more thematic, less cinematic reason, so is its ecological motive, which summons issues that have frequently been pushed aside in the last few years and provides the film an eerie plausibility that is seldom present in today's scare flicks. Regardless, the movie's tension would not have coiled as tautly as it did without the keen acuity of Fessenden (whose modest last effort, 2002's Wendigo, was unable to attain this film's consistency), who directs it with the awareness and craft of a master, complying only with the viewers' imagination (and not with the cliched tactics of suspense horror) to create an overpowering sense of dread (much like, though not as well as, '99's The Blair Witch Project).
The performances mold well to the tone of the film, though Perlman's typecast stubborn badass quickly grows tired and even irritating (there's no wry humor to level his willful skepticism like in Hellboy). Beyond LeGros' vacillating protagonist, the only other two characters with prominent screen time are Maxwell, who's well-played by Zack Gilford (TV's Friday Night Lights), though he merely lasts thirty minutes, and Abby (Connie Britton), one of the gang's only two women (the other is the station's cook, Dawn), who Ed has a thing for but who's in a relationship with Hoffman. You'll be hard-pressed to find a standout act from anyone in the film if you go searching, but one isn't necessary -- the film's about creating a believability that's real enough to go unnoticed and make its viewers feel uneasy, and it succeeds in both cases, and the cast and their roles are an undeniable reason. -
MCT:June 6, 2008
A horror film with smarts; Fessenden has a strong feel for atmosphere and a love of the patient scare.
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MCT:April 27, 2008
Well acted suspense thriller with obvious parallels to 'The Thing'. Its low budget effects hamper the ending.
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MCT:April 13, 2008
a good starring role for hellboy himself ron perlman, in a interesting film,a horror that tackles enviromental issues and is both enjoyable and exiting
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MCT:January 5, 2008
A combination of John Carpenter's "The Thing"'s paranoia and a mixture of 'An Inconvenient Truth"'s message of global warming by way of the supernatural unspooling of "The Shining" and the combination of the former and latter's isolation/cabin fever/stir crazy fueled tension makes a fine cocktail of modern-day terror.
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MCT:November 27, 2007Starts out way too slowly. Then when it finally starts, it looks good for a few minutes before turning steeply downhill. Ghost reindeers? At least it looks mostly good.
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MCT:October 16, 2007Ron Perlman (HellBoy) did not dissapoint. A different Look on Global Warming. Easy to follow film, but will leave you with some unanswered questions.
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MCT:September 19, 2007
This film is absolutely gorgeous (which must seem a strange thing to say about a horror/thriller), but I kept gasping at the composition, the design, the effects, etc. For me, the film falls apart toward the end of the narrative: the audience is asked to take a huge leap that I'm not sure has been set up enough. That said, I was so caught up in the atmosphere of the film, that I willingly jumped and only afterward thought, "Wait--I wish they had . . ." Then again, the lack of over-exposition is what sets this apart from cheesier horror movies, so I guess it's somewhat appropriate that the audience is nearly as in the dark as the characters themselves as to what is happening. I guess what it comes down to is that I'm certain allusions and imagery were flying past me the whole time without my realizing it, and I wish I were a little more aware.
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MCT:September 10, 2007
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MCT:August 20, 2007
hmm.
watched it yesterday and the ending confused me.
i'll re-watch it again and give a clearer review later.
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