Saturday, September 26, 2009

Winterbeast (1991)

You all know my loathing for all the people writing comments on IMDB? Here another couple of reasons for that:

"This is quite simply the most terrible film I have ever seen in my life"

"This movie has opened my eyes to how horrible a movie can be"

"Good Heavens...this is one truly abysmal film"

"So bad it's just bad"


I know you should respect other people opinions, but fuck it. These people are nazi-pedophiles! Or at least stupid, stupid, stupid morons ;) A boring film is a bad film, and Winterbeast is never boring. It might have one of the most incoherent scripts I've seen, some fantastic overacting, cramped sets, extremly uneven cinematography and sound... but it also have cool stop-motion, a good pace, actors that are clearly having really fun. 

The story, yes... I'm not sure. But the weird guy owning The Wild Goose Lodge is clearly involved somehow, maybe he started a monster/demon-invasion with some black indian magic, or maybe he's a serial killer. He listens to strange childrens song's and wears clown-masks to. Our hero, the mustasche-fanatic Sergeant Bill Whitman (played by the likable Tim R. Morgan), is trying to find out why people are dying in his town. Most of them are getting killed by various cool stop-motion monsters, often quite bloody. Something like that. The story. But see the movie yourself and you will probably understand.

First of all, there's no winter in Winterbeast. But that's not really important. This is looooooooow budget film-making, shot with whatever actors showed up at the casting-session and on sparetime between "real" jobs and on weekends. All this during a couple of years. So that means peoples looks are changing from scene to scene, sometime from cut to cut! Tim R. Morgan's mustasche is a film of it's own, and we see at least four different styles of mustasches (one of them is very fake... and red!). Charles Majka's haircut is also a living history of hair-fashion during these years. 

Director Christopher Thies claims he tried to strangle a member of the crew, but this is a movie full of love for film-making, cheesy gore and wild monsters! I mean, they actually completed the movie! My first "big" movie was never completed because we got tired of it - just like these guys, but they probably was stonger mentally then us swedish suckers! The monsters wasn't in the script from the beginning, so they feel a bit inserted here and there when the movie needs some action. But they are cool. We have a dragon, a gigant chicken, a tree-monster, a bigfoot/ape-monster that lives underground, something that looks like an alien and some more surprises. It's quite good stop-motion and the monsters has personality. 

At www.winterbeast.com you can buy the very entertaining special edition. There's an eighteen minute long making of with the director and producer, really funny. There's deleted scenes, a shot-on-video version of some of the scenes that where (wisely) cut from the movie, still photos and a commentary that I haven't listen to yet - but if they guys are as funny and informative in their documentary, it's probably a blast. 

Winterbeast is a proud member of those cool backwoods indie-flicks that where shot during the seventies and eighties for no money at all and this dvd is a must!

I have to quote my boyfriend: "A perfect movie when smoking weed". I don't know anything about that though. But he's probably correct.

3 comments:

Patrick B said...

Was your poster signed?

Ninja Dixon said...

Yes, it was signed by the director :)

Patrick B said...

Mine wasn't signed :(