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The Last Winter

The big ideas get out, despite clumsy dialogue

By MICHAEL ATKINSON | September 26, 2007

2.5 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for The Last Winter.

Modern American psychotronica needs Larry Fessenden, a busy actor who has also established himself as horror films’ thinking artiste/auteur, routinely addressing contemporary social wounds (vivisection, addiction, neo-colonialism) using nasty, pulpy genre tools. He can be righteously obvious and dialogue-clumsy, but the big ideas will out: The Last Winter, his latest, takes inconvenient truths head-on, landing at a small oil-company outpost in the Arctic on the verge of excavation and gleefully watching as the warming elements, and whatever primeval force is released from under the melting permafrost, take down the Stagecoach-like crew one by one. The best actors (Kevin Corrigan, James LeGros, Connie Britton) juggle the sometimes stodgy lines, the less-than-best (Ron Perlman) drop them flat, and Fessenden makes great hay with his icy locales and frozen corpses. Both the F/X and the sermonizing are a little groan-worthy, but the mood is helpless and apocalyptic.

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