Buy It Now: The Last Winter

Dir. Larry Fessenden

Rating: 5.3  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

Larry Fessenden is the kind of under-the-radar indie filmmaker whom you always hoped would get a chance to show his stuff to a larger audience someday. For decades now the actor/writer/director has been  fighting the good fight with better-than-average films like Habit and Wendigo. Yes, the films had flaws (the first two thirds of the latter are so good, you are truly disappointed to see the last act crumble), but you could see serious talent there. With his newest film, he's cobbled together a solid cast and a perfect setting; only the result is just as mixed as with his previous films. As part of his ongoing horror series, featuring an angered nature spirit tearing through unsuspecting disbelievers, The Last Winter is closely connected to the aforementioned Wendigo with respect to both its strengths and its weaknesses. In Wendigo a young family from New York head upstate for a weekend in the country and accidentally run afoul of some bad-ass locals and an enraged spirti; here, it's a group of scientists and oil men, planning to dig up the arctic wilderness of Alaska. Both films seem to do all the hard work very well -- the characters are believable and richly detailed, the dialogue rings true, the atmosphere of dread is well rendered -- but when it comes to the actual payoff, wherein the spirit actually makes itself manifest, both films suddenly veer into The Frighteners territory: laughably bad special effects and all. There's something, too, that feels rushed about the last act, as if Fessenden had either run out of time, patience or money to put the care that he utilized in the set-up. The cast is just fine. James LeGros shines in the Richard Dreyfus/Jaws role of decent scientist forced to deal with a conniving business man, here personified by the estimable Ron Perlman; Connie Britton does solid work as the scientist caught between the two of them. One just wishes that Fessenden saw through his projects to the very end. There's simply too much of a sense of lost opportunity here. A chance to make a perfectly thrilling film with a none-too-subtle environmental message, but, alas, by the end, the CGI takes over and we feel a little silly for caring so much in the first place.

The DVD release also includes the ubiquitous "making of" featurette, and a commentary by Fessenden himself.

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