Wendigo

This film based on Ojibwa (chippewa) and Algonquin Native American Legends.

I had expected this film to center mostly around this but it was only a small part of the plot.

The Wendigo, Windigo, or Windago is a spirit that comes with the wind. It would entice persons by calling to them in an irresistable way. It then would drag its victims along at great speeds until they burn up.

This film mostly centers around a family that vacations un upstate New York during winter and have an unpleasant run in with some local hunters. This film has some excellent cinematography and special camera angles. There is much time-lapse photography and one part with the now-famous "time slice" photography better known as "bullet time" which was made famous in "The Matrix (1999)"

It is an unusual film and I could describe it as a combination of Blair Witch, Sixth Sense, Abominable Snowman.

I like horror movies a lot and have seen a great many of them. I rented this movie with misgivings which were, alas, justified. For approximately the first hour, very little happened. A couple & small child driving along the woods hit a deer then encounter some hunters, one of whom has a screw loose. Words are exchanged and the family eventually gets unstuck from the ditch they ran into after hitting the deer. After that, for about an hour, not much happens.

A horror movie, above all, should not be boring, and this one is. All that happens occurs in the last 1/2 hour.

As a character-driven chiller, Wendigo is a thoroughly satisfying film, though not one that successfully plays out its early promise. From the establishing shot of a young family driving a winding road into the darkened wilderness I was immediately reminded of The Shining. And if Wendigo doesn't quite display that films polished visuals, it certainly borrows the themes of isolation and familial tension, especially patriarchal, that Kubrick examined so well. Cult director Larry Fessenden has gone back to horror movie basics to achieve a palpable tension in his film: black shadows in every corner of a very-underlit rural house, creaky floorboards, shrieking nighttime winds. His film starts to unravel when he pushes to far - the appearance of the Wendigo, an Indian spirit that travels on the wind, is at first frightening but ultimately overplayed; Fessenden feels compelled to reveal the monster in an extended attack sequence on the films hillbilly badguy, and in doing so belies the slyness with which we had so successfully frightened us up to that point. The ending is particularly murky, both visually and narratively, feeling rushed and a little self-consciously obscure. The cast is uniformly solid: Jake Weber and Patricia Clarkson as the yuppies-in-peril are very real, and 'Malcolm In The Middle' youngster Erik Per Sullivan provides the perfect conduit for audience fear and apprehension. The print I viewed at the recent AFM conference was particularly grainy and I am unsure as to whether this was due to the transfer from HDV-to-film or whether Fessenden shot it like that. Regardless, it proved very effective in creating a sense of dread and foreboding, especially in the early twilight scenes. Also nice to see a film that revels in its ability to scare, not always winking at the audience in a self-mocking "Scream" sort-of way. More often than not lately irony and revisionism have gotten in the way of a good fright, which Wendigo certainly provides.

Larry Fessenden's Wendigo is a film that has stuck with me since I saw it years ago, a glowing textbook example on how to create chilly, effective and engrossing horror on a minimal budget, to maximum creepy effect. Set in the snowy drifts of Upstate New York in the dead of winter, a stressed out family heads up to a remote cottage for a rest. Following an accident, a dead deer and the subsequent altercations with angry locals, things take a turn for the supernatural as some dark force takes up residence on the cottage grounds, shaking the family to their collective core. There's an old legend out there about a spirit called Wendigo, a vengeful ghost that latches onto traumatic events, haunting those involved often right to their graves. These poor people awakened it, and it won't go away. Jake Weber, Patricia Clarkson and Dewey from Malcolm In The Middle are great as these folks, compelling in their sense of confusion and dread. The creature is rarely seen, save for a single stark image that I haven't forgotten since: after the car accident, the child looks a ways up the road and sees it standing there, a freaky spectre, all shadows, antlers and such. Spooky stuff.

The movie was pretty good. Entertaining to say the least. I just expected a little more wendigo like the title mentions. Story and acting are pretty good and entertaining. A lot of open ended items in story. This is a decent movie and a good for a rental. I was a little disappointed it wasn't more of a horror flick. The wendigo in legend is supposed to have an insatiable appetite that grows as it does. The more it eats the more it has to eat and so on. It also smells bad like that of rot, and decay and death. Like I said it is pretty good, I just expected the Wendigo to play more of a part in the movie like the title says.