There is no better time to watch this movie than during the winter. Read that sentence again and strike it from your memory, because it's wrong. There is no better time to watch this movie than anytime. Watch it constantly, because it is a tremendous flaw in space that must be observed continuously. New information pours from it constantly that makes our lives better. Winterbeast is charming, funny, atmospheric, and friendly. While also somehow managing to be rather sleazy. If movies that balance those many qualities evenly and consistently are considered to be well-made, then by George, this movie be well-made indeed. Let's get right to looking at what makes it great, but remember...flaw in space. It cannot be adequately described (much like most of the movies that crop up on this site, as you mighta noticed). But I will try.
The plot is relatively simple: two park rangers are trying to look for one of their missing team members and keep being blocked by the suspicious Mister Sheldon, who runs the last of the old Borscht Belt style vacation lodges on the mountain. (I am one of the queers who has nearly perfect gaydar, but I don't need to tell what's up with Mister Sheldon.) Meanwhile, one of the rangers is having dreams about a Native American human sacrifice idol, while is tied to the various claymation monsters wandering the woods, killing many people, including topless women. Several topless women appear in this movie but most of them are photographs. If you can't get your actresses to take their tops off, just put porn in your movie. That'll make up for it.
Anyway, yes, it turns out Sheldon is a servant of these ancient Native American demons, as demonstrated by his keeping several bodies in his house, and by the fact that his head melts. He ends up creating what is easily one of the most perfectly calculated "what the fuck" scenes" in cinematic history, which is what instantly sold the movie to me. You'll know the scene when you see it. The good guys win, of course. I'm okay with spoiling that, but I will not spoil the scene. When you see it, it will sell the movie to you too.
That murky cloud of cinema that people call "bad movies" often hold some truly great treasures. There are the movies that never tried, the movies that did try but failed, and the movies that tried and succeeded. Those that don't try are the worst, of course. The second category, the failures, are often magnificent in that they are the ones that are alienated from human experience and reality. Those are the ones that let us remember that sometimes the things we think matter really don't--things like realism and physics. The third category is sometimes not as purely entertaining as the second group, but it is still awesome to see a batch of people take on that ultimate foe of the capitalist society, pennilessness, and come out on top with a fulfilling, professional creation. Winterbeast is of the third category. It is clearly "cheap" and I think that, to a degree, that influences its obscurity. (Obviously some low-budget movies still make it to the top as "great" movies, but this blog is dedicated to greatness of a different sort. The winners have their prize by merit of winning--I want to help the losers win too.) But it's not amateurishly made, in regards to cinematography, acting, or effects. In fact, the effects really do rival those of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, and I don't need to specify which Clash. Were these effects too cheesy for 1991? I've read here and there that this movie took an incredibly long time to make, and in fact had its origin when Clash was being made. I'm always happy to see this stuff, and it looks better than a lot of the other stuff I've seen in the early '90s, that's for sure.
I don't think I'm alone when I consider this movie to sort of be in a trilogy with a couple of other movies. The first one is Equinox and the second is Evil Dead. Those two are classic horror movies that feature isolated forest settings wherein a group of average Joes have a brush with the supernatural, usually in the form of stop-motion animation. This particular style of movie always comforts me. Forests are some of the spookiest places on Earth and if you stir that in with some Harryhausenesque shenanigans, you've got a good thing going. These movies are serious but don't take themselves terribly seriously. They always preserve some degree of innocence, even as things like tree-rape and porn obsession leech into the narrative, changing with the times. They tend to remind me greatly of the monster movies of the 1950s, except unbound from the censors of their times. It really makes you think about what those movies could've looked like if the values had been different.
I guess if there's one thing this movie gives me, it's hope. If my memory serves me well and this is the movie that took, like, ten years total to shoot, I like to believe to believe that any of us unprivileged filmmakers can accomplish similar dreams if we have enough patience. As I've said in some previous entries, I'm about to give it another crack soon. But real life is upon. I have to work hours and do taxes and all that. So I must be patient if I'm to make this a reality. I must hang onto my passion. Winterbeast is a movie about passion, and because of how stupendous the final product is, it is a movie that shows the greatness of passion in turn. Do what you love. Allow yourself only your own rules, and you will do right. Just as long as you're not a dick about it.
Anyway. I don't know if my perspectives will be valuable to anyone or not. I'm at the point in my life where I want to be useful, but fear I'm not, while also wanting to do what I love. I'm scared that none of this stuff, the stuff I love, matters. Even if I know that that shouldn't matter to me. I do think these films can help people, if they're open to guts, gore, dicks, and general tastelessness. It's not about the content of the films, though. It's what they leave with you.
Winterbeast has left a lot with me. It helps me rest, knowing it's there no matter what the season.
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