rating: 
company: Mercury International Pictures
and Winterbeast Entertainment Group
year: 1991
runtime: 76′
country: United States
director: Christopher Thies
cast: Tim R. Morgan, Mike Magri,
Charles Majka, Bob Harlow,
Lissa Breer, Dori May Kelly
writers: Christopher Thies,
Joseph Calabrese and Mark Frizzell
cinematographers: Bob Goodness
and Craig B. Mathieson
music: Michael Perilstein
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There are bad movies, and there are worse movies. Then there is Winterbeast, which occupies an especially awful niche all its own. Begun with the best of independent exploitation intentions by friends Mark Frizzell and Christopher Thies, Winterbeast‘s production collapsed before the film could be completed, leaving Frizzell to piece together what footage there was as best as could be done. The complete uncompleted project was released to VHS in 1991 to near universal derision and forgotten . . . for a while, at least. Stupid DVD revolution . . .
Winterbeast has a slight problem with narrative continuity. Namely, there is none. The best I can piece together is that an old mountain is an ancient gateway to Hell, and that a crazy lodge manager who looks and sounds like an older version of this guy is feeding his guests to totem pole monsters so that said gateway will spit out a big powerful demon . . . or something. Combating the fiendish plot of the lodge owner (only a nutty Satanist would dare wear a plaid flannel shirt with a suit jacket and tie) are a group of under-introduced and mentally deficient forest rangers led by a guy with a perpetually changing mustache.
Now the gateway to hell / demon summoning storyline would have been easy enough to follow if said storyline hadn’t spontaneously combust (along with the surprisingly flammable lodge owner) an hour into the picture. From that point on its an endless procession of monster attacks, at least one of which is pretty cool, and unconnected dialogue. “Oh shit – I knew I shouldn’t have let them go up there!” says one man after looking at a white piece of paper. Who is he talking about? Why is he worried? What was on that piece of paper? I don’t know. Such are the mysteries of Winterbeast.
The ending comes rather unexpectedly. The wintery demon appears and slow-mo chases changing-mustache guy and his pal, who is carrying around some disembodied head idol thing. Changing-mustache guy grabs a Very pistol (and unlimited ammunition, apparently) and runs around shooting (badly) at the winterbeast with it. After a few minutes of that he randomly takes aim at the disembodied head idol thing his buddy is carrying and destroys it, causing the winterbeast, who has just sprouted an Alien-style toothy protuberance, to smolder and die. Changing-mustache guy and his pal laugh and wander off – the end?
There’s a lot of weirdness on display in Winterbeast, like gross misuse of plaid flannel clothing of all colors and a creepy stuffed deer head that shows up in multiple locations and always seems to be staring at the audience. Maybe it knows something we don’t. Perhaps it read the script. There are lots of monsters, though their purpose is as questionable as the rest of the picture. The attacks all progress in the same fashion, more or less: A random stop-motion armature appears and roars while a few reaction shots from the human cast are cut in. Then the monster picks up a playdough stand-in for a person, does something horrible to it, and disappears, never to be seen again. Some of the stop motion creations are kind of neat, notably a thorny dragon thing that munches down on a cardboard stand-in for one of the actors, but their appearances are mercilessly brief. The winterbeast itself is a man-in-suit creation that looks intimidating enough, but it doesn’t really do anything except wander around and eventually die.
The human action is as weird and inexplicable as the monster stuff. Changing-mustache guy and thorny-dragon victim spend the first 11 minutes of the picture looking at porno mags, followed directly by a monster attack featuring the film’s only other gratuitous nudity. Pretty much everything concerning the constantly screaming lodge owner is bizarre, though his pre-combustion song-and-dance number takes the cake. Just before confronting the heroes and setting himself ablaze he puts on an old recording of the What Can the Matter Be nursery rhyme, lip-syncs to it for a few lines, then puts on a creepy plastic mask and starts dancing around in a room full of previously unseen dead bodies. Then there’s the scene in which changing-mustache man and his pal look through a box of old native relics, ignoring a big fake penis that’s sitting atop everything else.
Weirdness aside, the majority of Winterbeast is comprised of useless and painfully static stretches of tempo-free dialogue. There are some real zingers in the mix, like the lodge owner screaming, “There aren’t any demons in this town except assholes who try to create them!” or changing-mustache guy’s redundant, “I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it in a dream. It was just like this! I saw it in a dream. It was just like this!” but most of it is dreadfully bland stuff. I shudder to think of how much more of it I’d have had to sit through had the film ever been finished . . .
Unbearable as the film can frequently be, the DVD of it released by its creators under the Winterbeast Entertainment Group label is pretty sweet. The film is here in an okay video transfer that presents with some encoding issues (blocking and the like) from time to time, but is plenty good enough for the title in question. What makes the package worthwhile are the supplements, which are far easier to recommend than Winterbeast itself. A 20 minute “Making Of” with the producer and director offers up plenty of production info as well as frequent jabs at the quality of the (un)finished product, more of which is to be had in the commentary track that accompanies the film. A brief audio piece with composer Michael Perilstein turns into a hilarious ad for an upcoming CD release of the film’s score, while an extra titled “Soap Opera” offers a short, alternate cut of the film constructed from unused footage shot on video by a briefly hired television crew. It’s good stuff all around, and more consistently entertaining than the film it accompanies.
I suppose the lesson of Winterbeast is not to count your ancient demons before they’ve hatched from a forest ranger’s chest . . . or something. I’ve seen it three times now and I’m not sure I’ve gained anything from the experience, other than a handful of laughs and an inordinate amount of confusion. The official Winterbeast site touts the film as “The Ultimate B-Movie”. I can’t agree with that particular assessment, but its weirdness is hard to deny. Recommended to those fond of tormenting their family and friends or cinephiles who have seen absolutely everything else the film world has to offer. Others proceed at their own peril.
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