Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
CREEPY, 16 Aug 2007
Larry Fessenden is someone to watch. With first Wendigo and now this, he should be on everyone's cinematic radar- having demonstrated a unique voice, a refusal to do things the way others do them and delivering two absolute masterpieces in a row.
Fessenden has a particular eye, a genuinely unnerving sense of pace and an approach to film-making that seems out of it's time. I can't tell if it's the depth of his characters, the measured beats of the screenplay, the great hollows of silence on the soundtrack or the straightforward refusal to write gags into his movies that does it, but it's like he's making movies for smart adults in a genre where such things are rare. And thank god for that, because this world could use some more Larry Fessendens to balance it out.
Briefly, Ron Perlman is a hard-bitten Oil Prospector working in the Arctic Tundra. He has to get the big machines in, so that drilling can begin- but the weather's shot to hell and Company-employed Environmentalist Hoffman won't sign the right papers. And something's out there in the wilderness. Something that drives men mad and may have doomed them all.
No spoilers here- see it 'cold' (if you'll pardon the pun). If you need it to be categorised, then imagine Kubrick's The Shining, crossed with Carpenter's The Thing, mixed up with Fessenden's own Wendigo sauce. It's a brutal, lyrical screenplay, using some fine actors and glorious cinematography- and it'll creep under your skin. Oh, just see it! Maybe that way, he'll make some more...
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Chilling Chamber Piece, 28 Feb 2008
Having recently watched the irritating 1408 and the ridiculous NUMBER 23, it was a pleasure to sit down with the low budget LAST WINTER, about which I knew nothing, and let the unease soak into my bones like a hard, cold wind. It's a movie that looks like developing a cult audience on DVD. And it deserves it. The sense of isolation and despair that develops as the characters slowly crack open is good. As the permafrost melts away, so does their sanity, and the idea that there's something really nasty about to rise up through the slush is pretty disturbing.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Winter horror land., 22 Nov 2007
The Last Winter is a curious mixture of psychological horror and eco-thriller. Writer , director and indeed actor Larry Fessenden has created a movie that is difficult to categorise and that poses a startling question. Is there a point at which mother nature -or what ever moniker you wish to use- will start viewing humanity as a virulent virus and seek to wipe us off the face of the earth?
Set in the artic region of Northen Alaska a team of oil drilling contractors are surveying the area in order to prepare for the eventual expolitation of the oilfields there. The teams leader Ed Pollack( Ron Perlman) is a brash loud get the job done type of guy and this leads to conflcit with Hoffman( James LeGros), an enviromental consultant employed by the oil comapny to weigh the enviroemntal concerns with the corporate desire to secure "energy independance" ( A token gesture) who is worried that the area is showing signs of enviromental depreciation. Their emnity is not helped by Hoffmans romantic involvement with Abby ( Connie Britton) another member of the crew who had previously been involved with Pollack.
Meanwhile the crews youngest member Maxwell ( Zach Gifford) starts to act with increasing eccentricity , muttering darkly about things on the ice until he wanders off alone and more worringly unclothed one night. Then things start to get really weird and it becomes increasingly apparent the team are in under attack from forces they cannot comprehend
The Last Winter is no slam bang gorefest .It has an intermiable insidious atmosphere, slowly escalating the tension and dread through portentous omens- sudden gusts of wind, ravens circling ominously and the indiginous foreboding frigid landscape until the moment the inhabitants of the station realise they are in a fight for survival.The ending is powerfully ambiguous and Fessenden allows his camera to prowl and swoop like a natural predator stalking its prey. There is a precision and ecomomy both to the script and the screenplay -indeed it,s only in the revelation of the nature of the threat that the film loses focus , and here it reminds me forcibly of the creature that inhabits Dan Simmons book "The Terror" which is tied in with native mythology .
A clever and absorbing film The Last Winter is more an exercise in creepy psychological terror than a committed horror film and its one that admirably refuses to pander to it,s audiences expectations with it,s final frame an audacious exercise in minimalism. And its enviromental message , based on hard fact( The permafrost surrounding Alaska and Canada is melting even as i write) is actually more powerful than any amount of statistics and hysterical hectoring.
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