Winterbeast (1991)

Winterbeast (1991)

4/10

"Children, come around the fire with Uncle Azathoth and listen to a tale most dire. A tale of greed, evil, plaid, incoherence, and stop motion tree monsters."

I will be placing the spoilers at the very end. There I will give some highlights of the monster scenes, for those who do not want to waste their time watching the movie but would like to get a taste of the film. The only real reason to watch this film is for the monster scenes.

Right off the bat I have to explain my rating. For an actual movie, it gets a 2. For the level of fun insanity it provides it gets a 7. This is a movie that is nearly incoherent, but has fun FX and characters you can't but help laughing at. (I know 9/2 = 4.5, but I rounded down for the poor sound quality). The movie looks like principal photography took place in the late '70s or early '80s. I have read that the film was not finished directly after principal shooting, but was later reconstructed from existing film and some newly added scenes, which was the cause for this mess. You can see the quality of film and sound differ between scenes, and paired with the jumbled editing, I am inclined to believe this.

The film takes place in a mountain town with a fancy lodge. The characters include the Innkeeper (who looks distressingly similar to an older Roddy McDowall), the Sheriff (technically 'Head Ranger', but Sheriff is shorter), his deputies, meat, and some other minor characters. And monsters, there shall be monsters.

The plot is straightforward, if you consider a maze to me straightforward in so much as there is an entrance and an exit. Everything from Point A to Point B is one twisted labyrinth of confusion. Don't worry too much when someone's friend is cut in half in front of him, and in the very next scene the person is talking about the weather. It's all cool like that in the mountains, way more laid back than the city. Anyway, some bad hoodoo gets released on the mountain, and like any self-respecting hoodoo, goes off and kills people. Investigations are started, some are abruptly stopped by disembowelments, and more people go missing. The Sheriff wants to close the mountain, but the mighty Innkeeper wants none of that, because it's "Fall Foliage Fest" time. At this point, if you can't figure out who the bad guy is, you have not (hint, hint) seen "Jaws". The Sheriff keeps investigating, fights some monsters, and discovers the reason why all this is happening. It would have been a nice touch if the Sheriff at this point broke the 4th wall and declared "the writer had an aneurysm ".

As I have mentioned, the movie jumps all over the place, so it is hard to keep track of all the supporting characters (if they survive longer than two minutes). The Sheriff is a genuinely good guy, if a bit dense, the Innkeeper is greedy and wacky, and everyone else is just trying to save their butts while wearing plaid. There are a number and variety of monsters. These are the reason to watch this movie. They are diverse, they are weird, and they are hilarious. At a running time of 75 minutes, you can catch all the fun parts in about 20-some minutes. The reason for this is that you don't want to listen to 80% of the dialogue (which is awful and generally makes little sense) and to miss all the plaid. There is lots of ugly plaid in this movie.

So the movie flops around and the dialogue is bad. However, most of the monsters are stop motion animation! Not Harryhausen quality, but not the awful CGI that is common today. The 'live action' monsters are forced perspective, which is nearly as strange looking. The monster scenes are quite fun, and often very funny. I am not sure if there was any actual directing involved with this movie, and the cinematography was OK in the fact that the camera was pointed in the correct direction. The sound quality is poor, the sound FX are awful, and there is one song that will make you want to poke out your eardrums. Don't even ask about the editing- at one point the monkey co-reviewers picked up scissors and went "snip, snip" at every bad cut, which was often enough to sound like a Caribbean steel drum band.

If you are a person who likes to see bad, strange films, or wacky fun monsters, you must rent this. I would only buy this if it was $3 or less. It does have some replay value due to the monster scenes, and it probably would play well at a party- it has some serious MST3K potential.

*** Now Comes the Spoilers ***

I feel a need to give some high(low)lights of this 'film' for those who do not want to spend the time to watch it.

The movie starts off with what turns out to be a dream sequence. The Sheriff is in a cabin and finds a zombified friend who pulls parts of himself off, and some worm-like creature flailing 5 foot 'arms' about. Sheriff wakes up startled, and a quick cut scene to a deputy in the forest with a skull popping out of his chest. This took all of 45 seconds.

Much bad dialogue later, we switch to a woman getting topless in a cabin. A stop animation tree monster grabs her through the window, resulting in the tree bashing a puppet into a model cabin. Short but effective. Some 'plot' happens for a while. After a bad 20 second Sasquatch-bug hybrid attack, we move on to a quick decapitation of a mountain climber by a monster that looks like a cross between a tree and a grey alien. A little bit later a blue mummy/zombie tears up the female deputy. All four of these sequences only take about 45 seconds each, they are fairly ridiculous, and the descriptions of the monsters were the best I could do.

Next is a scene where the Innkeeper strings up corpses of the dead people, puts on a happy clown mask, and sing and dances to a really, really disturbing song. The Sheriff and the remaining deputy catches him, confronts him, and the Innkeeper admits to being the cause behind it all. Something about channeling ancient Indian spirits through the sacred totem pole. Then he laughs and bursts into flames. Nope, not kidding. Here's the continuity part- right after flaming Innkeeper, the very next scene is the Sheriff calling the owner of the general store from the post office: "Hi Sheriff, how's business up at the lodge?" "It's a lot slower with the weekend over." Seriously. After some more useless talk, the Sheriff opens his mail. Seriously.

So the deputy goes to cut down the totem pole, which obviously comes alive, but he gets away. Cut to an abandoned hamlet with the Sheriff and Deputy Dog. After much looking pensive and walking around in plaid, a giant T-rex/rhino thing (I am so trying here, folks) bites of Deputy Dog's head. Best monster yet! Quick cut to the Sheriff running through the town's marketplace to a farm. Here he meets up with a vulture/chicken/parrot hybrid. Couldn't they just stick with something simple, like a snake! Not quite as cool as the T-rex.

After the Sheriff lights the totem pole on fire, which explodes for some reason, a 30 foot horned troll shows up and chases the Sheriff. The shop owner shows up to help the Sheriff. A really bad fight sequence happens. Dear Outer Lords of Insanity, the troll is destroyed by a flare gun shooting a little ceramic head! Then the two guys chuckle and slap each other on the back. Roll credits.