The Last Winter (2006)

Simply Perfect

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Nature fights back in Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter, a vaguely supernatural cautionary tale of of environmentalists and oil workers besieged by some unseen forces in the great north. Fessenden also brought us Wendigo back in the day, another snowbound chiller, and a keen sense of the eerie corners of the natural world and it's unexplored areas comes built in with his skill set. Ron Perlman doggedly plays Ed, the headstrong leader of a research party scouting arctic land for Big Oil to plant an ice road and pipeline. Connie Britton is his second in command and former flame, now shacking up with wildlife journalist James Legros. When the dead, naked body of a team member is found near their camp, natural gas emissions from the ground are suspected (so logical, guys). Yet, people continue to die, and some ominous presence gathers in the night just outside the perimeter of the station, inciting rising dread and distrust among the team and claiming victims with gathering speed. It's fun to watch Perlman slowly come unraveled, his grim sense of control slipping away as quickly as his rational explanations for what is happening. We never get a good look at whatever is out there, which is the smart way to go about your horror. The snow boils, strange sounds are heard and the natural world itself almost seems to be taking on angry life of it's own. It's obviously meant as a metaphor, but works just as well as a literal creature feature thanks to the sleek direction and well placed moments of chilly terror. Shades of The Thing, infused with this theme of the earth lashing out at the arrogance of human industrialization is a delicious flavour indeed.

To be honest I wasn't expecting much going into this film, yet was pleasantly surprised about it for about the first 45mins. As with all isolation movies, there is a profound sense of eeriness, and there are particular things (such as the box from the previous expedition, and a strange log book) which, I thought, were going to be good set ups for more mystery further on in the story. The acting wasn't by any means bad either. Ron Perlman was, well, Ron Perlman, and James Le Gros did fairly well as his opposite. It wasn't even that the characters were unlike-able or underdeveloped.But there certainly is a distinct point in the film where everything well and truly turns on its head. And from there it is all down hill.It actually baffles me completely that a film can go from eerie and interesting, to ridiculous and plain stupid like flipping a light switch. It was like the writers got to a point and said "hmm, we haven't killed many people yet. Probably should drop the storyline and do some character culling." Then proceeded to make completely irrational decisions that left you screaming at the screen in frustration. The biggest flaw in this film is that it never returns to the eeriness it started out with. Instead it decided it needed to go cliché and kill off characters in ways that were baffling. They never circle back to the set ups that they originally established, so leave you thinking 'well, what was the point'. And there is none!I am serious. The end of this movie has absolutely zero relation to the main storyline! And don't even get me started on the final shot. Whoever did that stroke of genius deserves a bullet. Overall my experience of this film went a lot like this: 'Cool. Oh yup. Hmm creepy. Oh yup. Ooo nice! Hmm, interesting. Wait, what? No seriously, what? WHY!? What the f**k. What the hell, just use the dead guys jacket!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? ....Are you serious. What,the,f**k. Let me guess, that's it? ...Yup damn. Well that was terrible.'As most people have stated, it was a film that showed serious potential but threw it all away by sticking its head up its own ass. Watch the first 45mins and walk away. At least the questions you have won't be shadowed by the unnecessary questions we are force fed at the end.

If you've ever wondered what the cast members of TV's "Friday Night Lights" were up to before they hit pay dirt with that wonderful series, check out "The Last Winter," where you can see no fewer than two of them - Connie Britton and Zach Gilford - fighting forces of evil together in a single film. Here they play employees of an energy firm that has sent a small team, headed by Ron Perlman, to the Arctic Circle to pump out the oil that lies beneath the newly-melting permafrost. James LeGros is a cocky environmentalist who keeps trying to convince everyone that something "not quite right" is happening to the climate in the area, but none of the "drill, baby, drill" types seem to want to listen. Yet, soon a mad-as-hell Mother Nature is taking matters into her own hands and, before you know it, rain is falling in February, the ice is breaking under the workers' feet, the equipment is malfunctioning, crows are circling the premises, planes are dropping out of the sky, people's noses are bleeding for no apparent reason, one man has wandered off into the wilderness stark naked, a mysterious creature is lurking around the base, and a strange form of madness has begun to settle in over the employees.There's really not a whole lot to say about "The Last Winter" - which has been directed, edited and co-written by Larry Fessenden - except that this cautionary-tale about the dangers of global warming is long on exposition and short on credibility and suspense. And, oh yes, the climax is really, really cheesy.It's nice to see Britton and Gilford outside the confines of Dylan, Texas for a change, but this low-grade mishmash of climate-change speculation and Inuit folklore - think of it as "The Thing" meets "An Inconvenient Truth" - has precious little else to recommend it.

A film that splits people in to two groups indeed. first of all lets look at the bad reviews, well to begin with there are no ghost moose's. The tension and horror in this film does not look to supernatural or alien things to scare us. Their might be a hint of that but when it comes down to it its about our imaginations, our superstitions and beliefs that trigger our responses to situations. The exorcist had a massive audience compared to this but it was all made up hokum and mostly hysterically funny. At least "The Last Winter" tried to take in to account cause and effect from a scientific point of view. it may not do it very well at times but the film has consistency. Apparently most Americans don't even believe that global warming is happening let alone that humans are contributing to it so its not surprising some of the films messages are dismissed. A gas that causes hallucinations and paranoia? We have made them so I'm sure nature can. If you are not a gore fest carnage freak then this is a film for you