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Shining |
Wendigo  BY: DAVID PERRY Larry Fessenden's minimalist horror film Wendigo attempts to turn The Evil Dead into a John Cassavetes film, creating a haphazard (but thankfully short) treatise on what's wrong with the contemporary horror genre. In 1991 he revamped Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with No Telling, in 1997 he glossed Bram Stoker's Dracula with Habit, and now he modifies Stephen King's The Shining with Wendigo. All of his films deal with the surrendering of a person's virtues when they move to and from the city, rarely capturing the intensity that Fessenden seems to think he's tapping. The film begins well enough, with the director successfully setting the stage for some truly eerie moments as his city-dwellers find discomfort en route to their lent Catskills vacation home. In the middle of some empty, snowy road, their little Volvo station wagon hits a buck when it jumps into the road. Soon three hunters appear, eyeing the dying animal that they've been after for most of the day. Two of them see this as an accident, but Otis (Speredakos) seems to take as much pleasure badgering mild-mannered father George (Weber) as he did shooting the maimed deer with his pistol. As George, a NY photographer, and his wife Kim (Clarkson), a psychoanalyst, try to fearfully keep Otis' rage aback, their child Miles (Per Sullivan) looks on the proceedings with a fear more intense than anything he might feel from the most terrifying nightmare. In fact, the harried couple must try to convince their son that these people are working from a code that is not violent to the country folk, however destructive it may seem to them. While looking down on Otis and his cohorts, they see killing deer for food as a condonable but slightly evil act, regardless of the way they got their leather boots and fur hats. But once the film leaves this fine double standard and the frightening class warfare of the Catskills v. Manhattan, the movie looses its footing. Otis' moves from roadside disturber to vandal to peeping tom, and the family tries to deal with the unspoken threats emanating from his nearby abode. All this plays to the Native American mythology that gives the film its title -- ranging from a stoic and invisible Indian guide (Oxendine) to a bag of sugar with a Native mascot. A wendigo -- as the elusive Indian seer tells Miles (paging Scatman Crothers) -- is a half-stag, half-man beast that feeds on the weak without any chance for being satiated. As the film so poorly shows the audience, though, the wendigo that, of course, comes to life in the movie looks far from threatening, just odd. Like the jackrabbit from America's Funniest People, this thing seems more suitable in a comedy than in a horror film (and, in fact, at the screening I was at, the entire audience went into hysterics at the first image of the wendigo). Fessenden seems to think that his wendigo will leave the audience shuddering, much like The Blair Witch Project, but missed out on the fact that the reason much of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's film worked so well is that its horrible imagery was left off of the screen. Instead, Fessenden just puts stuntman James Godwin into a suit that looks like a bundle of tree branches with deer antlers and expects the audience to fear the woods of upstate New York. Perhaps as a shorter film (and the movie is already short
as is), Wendigo might have been more successful. Many of the scenes seem
pointless with little prescience to the actual story Fessenden seems to be working with.
Characters are mentioned in passing and actions are tasked but untouched -- sure, it is
like life, but not something that can interestingly fill half of a 90-minute feature. This
film is all about atmosphere, but none of it ever pays off, leaving the audience wondering
what is happening. Normally, a movie like this -- a monotonous sojourn through Tobe Hooper
theatrics -- would be hard to sit through, but the hilarity throughout proves that old
dictum true: time flies when you're having fun. Too bad it's never intentional. |
