1990s, 1992, Action, F, Fantasy, Grade, Horror, monster, Review, review-movie, Year

Film Review: Winterbeast – 1992

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SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.The opening nightmare sequence by Whitman features a mysterious person with wounds; I believe this person to be Tello, the missing ranger. This would then make the nightmare a kind vision Whitman experiences as he watches the surreal depiction of his friend’s death. Unfortunately, Tello is rarely mentioned after this point as his disappearance is only used to get the characters off and moving, but since his actor, David Mica, is listed as playing him, I have to assume this is the scene where because no other possible moment for Tello to be present exists. If anything, this lack of clarity demonstrates the fundamental problem with Winterbeast: lack of follow-up or clarification to on plot elements makes the spectacle less interesting because there’s nothing to make the violence worth caring about.

Charlie (Charles Majka) walks into the lodge with a totem.
Charlie (Charles Majka) walks into Mr. Sheldon’s performance while holding a head.
Charlie (Charles Majka) leaves the room holding a spear.
Charlie goes through three separate, unrelated items in his hands in one scene of traversing the lodge. None of the items are explained and the reasoning behind his decisions isn’t touched upon, making the sequence feel like a cobbled together attempt at getting from point A to B.

2.The scene of Charlie traversing the lodge is riddled with continuity errors, the most striking of which is that Charlie has a different, inexplicable object in his hand in every room. He starts with a totem, then has a head, and finally ends with a spear. Why or how he gets any of these items is never explained. It definitely feels like Theis and company were scrambling through footage of Charlie moving around and had to edit them together to give the impression of him investigating. Regardless, it’s one of Winterbeast’s great mysteries.

Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow) sings to a mask.
Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow) dances and sings along with a corpse.
Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow) self-immolates.
Mr. Sheldon’s odd, ritualistic singing and dancing routine is the most entertaining part of the movie partly due to its sheer incongruity with the nature of everything that came before. It goes on for so long as to threaten to become disturbing as it continues for an oddly long time before eventually ending in an even bigger enigma than it started as.

3. Bob Harlow is the best part of the movie and his performance as Mr. Sheldon is the only times when the movie becomes memorable even if it remains incoherent. His dance sequence is absolutely terrifying and goes on for so long that it threatens to become disturbing.

But instead of following up this bizarre sequence with something to ground it, the story ups the ante and has Mr. Sheldon explain that the monsters are being “summoned here by their image” which makes them capable of being controlled; there is no clarification as to what this “image” is and when asked why he would do something, Mr.Sheldon doubles down on the ambiguity, cackles menacingly, and then explodes in a burst of flames. Why did he die? Was this part of the image technique? Was the dance required to burst into flames later? It’s all just questions here in Winterbeast.

Still, this is the best part of the movie.

There’s a phallus shaped object prominently in the box.
But the charm turns out to be a much smaller item hiding behind the phallus.
The scene of Charlie showing Whitman the magical totem left behind by Burning Wolf feels like either an elaborate, sly “dick-in-the-box” joke or like a prop-mishap that no one ended up catching.

4.When Charlie shows Whitman the magical totem capable of warding off the Winterbeast, he initially presents a box that seems to have a penis in it. The visual focus on the phallic object immediately makes one think that it’s the totem. But then the totem is revealed to be a much smaller object hiding behind the phallus at which point it becomes hard to tell if the scene is a long, sly “dick-in-the-box” joke or if a phallus object was just in the prop box and they crew just didn’t care enough to remove it.

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