As such terror is harder and harder to articulate, the film is most effective when it abandons dialogue and leaves the camera to do its very spooky work.
The Last Winter (2007)
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Starring: Ron Perlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Kevin Corrigan, Jamie Harrold
Screenwriter: Larry Fessenden, Robert Leaver
Producer: Larry Fessenden, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
Composer: Jeff Grace
DVD Info
Release:
Oct 7, 2009
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Full Frame - 1.33
Audio:
- Unspecified - English
Reviews
Last Winter does make good on its intriguing premise. And after a dandy beginning and a so-so middle, it delivers a knockout ending.
Fessenden, who directed, produced, cowrote, edited and even has a part in the film rightly values mood at least as much as he does delivering more abominable snow monsters.
The problem is that the ghostly culprit, some sort of nature spirit, isn't nearly as terrifying as the arguments that Pollack makes, or the fact that the ice in such places really is weakening.
Die-hard greenies may find this as unsettling as it's meant to be. For everyone else, it's closer to an atmospheric act of recycling.
The Last Winter's heart is in the right place, but it isn't pumping any blood.
This message hangs over the entire film... but Fessenden still manages to craft an intense and effective thriller.
Come for the eerie unworldly menace, but stay for the well-balanced currents of terror that manages to sustain itself throughout the film.
It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts -- and unnerves -- in this most chilling of global-warming movies.
A well done low budget indie production that lets the viewers' imagination picture how bad it gets when mother earth is finally pushed past the breaking point
A horror movie about the consequences of global warming. Set in the Alaskan Wildlife Natural Reserve, the oil company is far scarier than the monsters that attack the movie's main characters.
Fessenden's best film to date is a horror movie built on eerie atmosphere and unspoken terror. Director of photography Magni Agustsson achieves beautiful visual textures and distances that allow hidden meanings to saturate the audience.
A richly drawn, ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful... This is filmmaking both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.
In the end, the scariest thing about The Last Winter is how few of its ideas seem truly fantastic or implausible.
Even if this is no red-blooded shocker, its unsettling mood lingers long past the final fade-out, hinting at all sorts of retribution just lying in wait for polluters.
Larry Fessenden has fashioned a different kind of horror movie here, one that moves at glacial speed, offers few scares and provides the viewer virtually no satisfaction.
Consistently chilling (no, that's not a pun), with crisp, haunting visuals and sound character relationships.
Fessenden can’t get a rhythm going in this film to build to his big conclusion, he renders it silly.
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by: gohawks3 10/16/07





