Now while I am a stubborn man I can accept a lot of things when it comes to environmental recreation. I can accept Al Gore as a competent and sometimes dynamic authority on Global Warming. I can accept Penn and Teller as amusing and informed dissenting opinions on recycling. I can even grudgingly accept a telepathic gorilla who anonymously posts tiny classified ads for people to follow his teachings on how to fix the world. What I cannot accept is solar wind powered killer caribou.
At the top of the world an oil company’s advance exploration team is trying to finalize plans to begin drilling for oil in one of the last pristine wilderness left. As the crew creeps ever closer to finalizing their mission, they slowly begin to realize that the environment is acting in ways never seen before, leading to speculation that this might be The Last Winter ever.
Director Larry Fessenden (Wendigo) is a bit of a cult favorite for “intelligent” horror fans. What this really means is Fessenden’s fans think they are smarter then everyone else but let me take the remainder of this sentence to assure you they are not . Fessenden’s film are notorious for being light on gore, scares, and entertainment and The Last Winter keeps this rich tradition alive. The film is heavy in its doomsday message but relys far too much on gusts of wind to convey a sense of ominous ethereal doom. So when Maxwell “House” McKinder (Zach Gilford) approaches a box covering a former test drilling site the wind rushes up fully convincing him something horrible must be living in the ground. When super Environmentalist James Hoffman (James LeGros) hears wind outside his makeshift tent he realizes that the ground must have turned sour. That is science speak for the oil is tainted and evil, so don’t even think about burying your cat Church anywhere near the drilling site.
While the direction and script are outright awful, the acting is passable at best. Ron Perlman (Hellboy 2: The Golden Army) is the eternally angry Ed Pollack, and while Perlman is perfectly capable of playing an irascible cur to great effect, that he is continually asked to play a forlorned lover forces him in a position of acting in ways he is simply not capable of. Fessenden has essentially set Perlman up to fail, which is a poor trait in a director. The rest of the cast doesn’t do much with the little they have, typically acting as caricatures of the archetypes found in other, better horror films.
But what truly gets my goat, trust me that pun will be funnier the further along you read this review, is the insultingly bad final reel. While Fessenden has setup the rest of the film as an attempted eerie atmospheric horror film, the film loses all credibility when he gives Mother Nature’s perceived hostility a physical form. You can cry and moan about spoilers till you are blue in the face but this is something you need to know. This vengeful monster is a herd of caribou created from the Aurora Borealis. That’s right, and I can not emphasize this point enough, according to The Last Winter atmospheric fluorescent plasma hates your freaking guts and wants you to die.
With such a stupid contrivance shoved in my face the film inevitably lost all plausibility. Thus the environmental message Fessenden was repeatedly trying to jam down our throats instantly became the rantings of a shallow and egotistical director who seemingly thought that he was in a position to cast stones in a glass house. Hey Larry, that film stock you shot on and is being used to make the prints circling around the globe? It’s made with gelatin, primarily from horses that have been euthanized. So when the self-aware sociopathic Mother Nature you have envisioned sends her herd of cloven hooved vigilantes you are just as screwed as the rest of us.
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