Movie Review: The Last Winter

What do you think when you see a DVD box that has a frozen dead guy on the cover, has a quote from the L.A. Daily News that it's "The SCARIEST movie of the year", when the New York Times calls it "...Feverishly real, TERRIFYING", and when the synopsis on the back of the box says this: "In the pristine tundra of Northern Alaska, winter is brutal. But for one small team of oil scouts, this season is about to turn deadly. As an unseen evil stalks the isolated crew, nature's violent fury adds to their fear and torment. Horrifying visions in the snow close in, and they'll son discover that not everything buried below the ice is resting in peace."
This is The Last Winter, the most boring "horror" movie I've seen.
Does it seem as if those who wrote about this movie are trying to make it sound as scary as possible? That's because the actual film lacks entirely of anything frightening. Yes, that's right. The only part I found scary was the very end, because I was so confused that I just seemed frightened. What made this movie "Scary" was the premise that they MIGHT introduce something that MIGHT be scary.
First of all, look at that line "an unseen evil". If you're like me, you imagine something, um, well, EVIL out there. Like EVIL. Something that's not good, but EVIL. What do YOU think of when you hear the word "evil"? I think of demons, monstrosities, vampires, werewolves, the occult, every character from Sorority Row... while watching the movie, I actually CHECKED how far into it we were, and after seeing we were about 31 minutes in, I was wondering if any of this so-called "evil" would show itself. There was nothing. The entire movie was about people going crazy. Couldn't they at least have been honest when describing it. "A team of oil scouts flip balls and die one by one". THAT would have been more honest. "Unseen evil"... give me a break.
No, this movie is not about evil. It doesn't have "monsters" and it's not a twin to The Thing, either. You want to know what it is? It's a piece of shit. Maybe I wouldn't judge it so much if it didn't present itself as "THE SCARIEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR OMG YOU'LL SHIT YOUR PANTS AND HIDE UNDER THE BED, NO MILK AND COOKIES FOR YOU, YOU LITTLE BITCH!!!" Maybe if the movie didn't make it seem like there'd be something cool about it, I wouldn't expect merciless slaughter of all of the characters, which I was hoping for. No, this is another one of those VERY subtle "Man Vs. Nature" movies, and it fucking lies to you up until the end about being exactly that. You know what? I don't want a fucking movie to lie to me. If it's going to be about Global Warming, MAKE IT ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING. DON'T TRY TO MAKE IT A "HORROR" MOVIE.
So here's your story. You have an entire group of jackasses, the aforementioned "oil scouts" sent by North industries to Alaska. Clever name, eh? Wonder how they came up with that one. What they should have been called was "Facial Hair Industries" since almost all of them had such. Their mission: oil rigs, ice roads, what a blast. The ever-so-angry Ron Perlman plays the dastardly leader of the team, Ed Pollack, who is so unrealistic in his stubbornness that it makes you wonder if you're really watching a movie or not. James Hoffman is the typical "negotiator" character who is always like "We gotta get outta here, man!!!" Maxwell is Ed Pollack's nephew, and he's nuts. The rest are pointless characters thrown in just to have more characters in the film.
One of the initial things that annoyed me was the way they portrayed this weird shed out in the middle of nowhere. I don't even know if it was a shed, it might have been a door into a pipeline or something, but there were long, wide shots of it, like you should remember it or something. I thought later on in the film, it might have some significance, the way they made you stare at the fucking thing. But... it wasn't. Nothing ever happened with it. And I got this feeling of "I got gipped" after the movie was over, because I really wanted to know what was in it, since I had to stare at it a lot. This was the one thing that seemed like it might be interesting in between all the "you stole my woman you son of a bitch" bullshit. Actually, THAT should have been the title of the movie. You Stole My Woman, Bro. Emmy-award-winning title there.
You want to know how many significant things happened in this entire film? I don't know, I'd say at least three. You want to hear them? Okay.
Maxwell suddenly disappears and no one can find him or contact him on radio. Did the UNSEEN EVIL snatch him up?! None of them seem really all that bothered, they just keep bitching about their jobs and "you stole my woman". "Bro". Maxwell continues to be gone for a while, but finally he returns, and, doesn't look at all like he's freezing his skinny white ass off. They say he even walked something, like, 300 miles or something by looking at some weird radar? I mean, he was gone for days. Just wandering around out in the snow. He returns looking like a million bucks. Well, he looks tired, but a million bucks nonetheless.
Maxwell starts going apeshit talking about, well, some crazy shit. He tries to explain to Hoffman what he felt when gone and how it, in crazy terms, looks like total shit out there. He mumbles a lot. Hoffman tries to offer him food, and in the worst edited scene ever, Maxwell knocks the plate out of his hand. You know, Maxwell, you could have said no. That's all you had to do. Did you really have to throw it against the wall?
Maxwell eventually thinks that apparently it's too hot in Alaska, and one night, strips down to his bare, pale ass with a video camera in front of him, in probably the films single, solitary erotic moment (no, not when Hoffman and Abby are grunting like pigs in the sack). You'll notice I'm mostly talking about Maxwell's character, because he's the only one that moved the plot forward and the remaining characters just whined a lot. After Maxwell is good and naked enough, he walks right outside into the snow, barefoot, with his camera. The other characters gripe some more, until they realize Maxwell is gone. Oh boy, another search for the missing dude. This movie drags, and I mean, DRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGS. Do they really have to do the same thing twice and throw little odd-ball things in between?
So, I should mention that Hoffman has been hearing some strange things and seeing things moving in the snow. But it doesn't really last long, and you don't get to see anything remotely exciting. This movie is sort of like when your mom tells you you're going to the amusement park, and you say "YEAH THE AMUSEMENT PARK, KICK ASS!" And then you learn the park is five hours away. That's what this is like. It's boring. It's incredibly boring, and nothing is revealed until the very tail-end of the fucking movie. But I digress, you only get a "hint" that something is wrong. And even that isn't enough to entertain.
They find Maxwell dead with crows eating a number of his special parts, and so people start to panic JUST a tad. They find Maxwell's camera and watch what he filmed. Maxwell, stuttering like a maniac, I'm guessing it's because he's scared and not freezing cold, keeps asking "can you see it?" The answer to this question is a big fat fucking "no". All you see is snow and wind, and he keeps asking, as if testing your fucking patience. He seemed to be specifically talking to his father, whom was not present, so who knows? Finally Maxwell turns the camera around to face himself and something very big and very odd clobbers him. At least I think it clobbers him. It was vague. No one seems to comment on the fact that there was something behind Maxwell, so they just all forget about it. Pollack decides to burn the tape, because he doesn't want Maxwell's father to know he went cuckoo. Well, you do know that you have to tell his father that you got him killed right?
So the other characters start to die, and my god, this movie DRAGS ON!!!!!! In my personal opinion, it should have been much shorter than it was. There's no way to even cover all the things that happen because it was so bland. The researcher's nose bleeds, and he dies by bleeding to death. Some Native American goes and gets lost or something, who I believe also went nuts and began taking apart the snowmobiles. Hoffman and Pollack decide to go to town to get some help or something, and SOMEHOW, I don't know how, they leak oil from their Skiddoos, so they're unable to ride them any longer, so now they have to walk three miles. Well, that is, after the movie tries to portray two men arguing about where to go and what to do as an action sequence. Not only that, but a man getting his foot stuck in the water. I guess that was supposed to be exciting, too, right? Pollack, running off like a lunatic, manages to step through some fragile ice and his foot somehow gets caught between two rocks, and from a physics standpoint, I don't see how this could have happened at all. It didn't make any sense from the way it looked.
Hoffman helps Pollack and makes a fire for him. After they're warm, Pollack decides it's time to go wander off in the dark. Hoffman agrees to it I guess, but then has a bit of an odd moment and begins to get lost. Abby, the useless, pointless character ends up smashing the other woman's head in while she was trying to smother a dying man. I guess I could say "Good work, Abby" but it wasn't. Hoffman and Abby try to talk to each other on the radio, but the unseen evil cuts them off, I suppose. It's finally revealed what the the images were that Hoffman was seeing: a bunch of spectral, skeletal horses and a giant ghost caribou. No, you read that correctly. GHOST CARIBOU. So Hoffman shoots off his flare gun to distract that monster thing, and some more ghost caribou come over and kill him.
LOL I'm just kidding, that's just a hallucination. He freezes to death.
I'm serious.
The "monsters" are a result of sour gas (natural gas containing hydrogen sulfide), which caused some hallucinations and insanity. The sour gas was seeping out of the ground because the permafrost had melted, due to the result of Global Warming. That's right. It wasn't monsters, it was GODDAMN GLOBAL WARMING ALL ALONG.
So you might be asking about what Hoffman saw in the video. According to a few sources, Hoffman was the only one that saw that image in the video Maxwell made, the one of the giant thing behind him, clobbering him. No one else seemed to see any other images of ghost caribou except for Hoffman, either. This is seriously retarded. Like, I'm still pissed about it.
What kind of idiot makes a movie about Global Warming to try to terrify his audience, knowing for certain that most people are afraid of the affects of Global Warming, and try to make money off of that? Oh, it was an independent film, too, shown at a festival, and, go on, take a guess at when it was released. Yeah. September 11th.
So, you want to hear the end? It's reeeeeeeeeally dumb! Come on, I know you want to hear it. Come on.
All right, here I go.
So Abby somehow wakes up in the hospital, which I affectionately referred to as "no-staff hospital" and she sees she's pretty much alone there. Until she sees the dead doctor who hung himself in his office, in the movie's most confusing moment of all. That's one thing you don't want to see in a hospital, no matter where you're from. No care is the best care, meaning if your doctor killed himself, you'll have to write your own damn prescriptions. Abby walks outside and.... uh... why is it showing an aerial view of her head...? Yeah, I see giant pools of water around her.... there's... water... what the fuck is this? Why won't it pan out? PAN OUT!!! SHOW MORE!!! The camera just... sits there. There's Abby... standing there... near some water... SHOW ME MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF?!?!?!?! So you hear some sirens and car alarms, and you're supposed to conclude it's the end of the world because of Global Warming.
Some other people have speculated that what Hoffman really saw really WERE ghosts, the "spirit of the wendigo" people call it. That's even fucking stupider than saying they hallucinated everthing. Now, really, I love monsters. But that is incredibly dumb. If it really was ghost caribou, I think I'm going to stay away from independent films for a loooong time.
My score: 1 out of 10. That 1 is for a young man getting naked in the middle of Alaska. You don't get much funnier than that.
33 percent of audiences enjoyed this, according to rotten tomatoes, and it's a 76 percent fresh on the tomatometer. Good enough for them, but pretty damn rotten enough for me. Metacritic's metascore was 69 out of 100.
Some people who enjoy the film tend to criticize those who dislike it, saying it might not be a good enough movie for those who don't care about the ozone layer. Trust me, I care more about the planet than I like to assess, in fact I make it an endeavor to never litter. I believe fully in science, in nature, and most of all, I believe the planet should be taken care of.
What I DON'T believe is that a shitty movie should be made about the consequences of doing the opposite. It makes for a good life lesson, but not a film, especially a bad one.