But Let's Try This Again

[handful_ofdust]

In case you should walk away from this thinking: Man, Gemma's gone soft! She likes ANY sort of crap!, I will point out that I also rented Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter, and found it excellent. Probably the least experimental or overtly "indie" of Fessenden's films thus far, it enlarges on ecological themes found in Wendigo, as well as (in a far more global way) the man-as-addict backbone of Habit. The effects are clean and well-used, the initial character-building pays out, the central reading-the-notebook sequence recalls some of the frenetic montage-work in Pi...we get a genuinely scary reveal or three, expert use of landscape, a hallucinatory climax followed by the bleakest anticlimax I've seen in years. Any fan of Ron Perlman who wants to confirm what he looks like without makeup should absolutely seek this out, along with all those who love good horror generally.