Hey folks, Harry here... Back at Sundance 1997 I met a director by the name of Larry Fessenden, he had just popped out of the woodwork with a wonderful small genre film called HABIT (find it if you haven't). It was a shoestring horror flick that didn't look it. He had oodles of style, tons of atmosphere, and I remember thinking that his film was not only good, but that this Larry Fessenden... who was sitting near me.... was really freaking my shit out. He just had a creepy quality to himself there. Might've been because I'd seen the film and there's some less than normal situations that he winds up in in the film... But I think he was slightly crazy. Slightly crazy in that wonderful way that many genre directors are slightly crazy... Like that craziness you see in Wes Craven or Guillermo Del Toro or David Cronenberg... If you meet Larry Fessenden... you'd see a bit of that unhinged feeling from him. And it shows in his work, in all the best ways. This trailer for WENDIGO is unhinged. It's off, not in a bad way, but in a THIS IS CREEPY way. Like a dangerous Tim Burton. Check it out! Also, below the link I've included Moriarty's review from FANTASIA, the Canadian Film fest which he fell in love with last year, of WENDIGO. There are many spoilers in it, but when Moriarty calls something a supernatural STRAW DOGS... I'm interested. Here ya go....

Click Here For A Really Atmospheric Trailer!!!!

BEWARE OF SPOILERS...

After a break, the theater filled up completely for the evening’s second film, and programmer Mitch Davis took the stage to enthusiastically introduce Larry Fessenden’s WENDIGO. Having seen it now, I can understand Mitch’s wild enthusiasm for it. This is a smart, adult feature that stands head and shoulders above most genre offerings in its naturalistic approach to its characters and its subject matter, a supernatural STRAW DOGS that deserves a wide audience when it is released in the US in February 2002.

The start of the film evokes the start of Kubrick’s THE SHINING, with the sight of a family in a car, driving through a snowy wilderness. Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber are Kim and George, and Erik Per Sullivan (Dewey on MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE) is their son Miles. He’s seated in the back, lost in his fantasy wrestling match between a pair of action figures, a Shogun Warrior and the Wolf Man. There’s a dreamy, languid quality to these opening moments, shattered when George runs into a deer that darts out into the road in front of them. It’s sudden, shocking, and the car is sent into a skid that takes it off the road. George gets out of the car to investigate and sees that the animal is still alive, still twitching. Before he can decide what to do about it, three hunters with rifles come running up, and a confrontation unfolds. One of the hunters, Otis (played with a nice sense of restraint by John Speredakos) goes ballistic when he realizes the antler on the buck is cracked. Kim, in turn, freaks out when Otis finishes the deer off with a pistol not ten feet from their car, in plain view of Miles. It’s clear from the start that we’re dealing with two radically different world views here, and the collision causes instant friction.

It doesn’t help that the house George and Kim are staying in is the house Otis grew up in, a house that was sold out from under him by his sister. He takes random shots at the house, and George and Kim find bullet holes in windows, slugs buried in walls. He also spies on them at night while they’re making love. In this early movement, it would be easy to think this is just another city folks versus the hicks film, but Fessenden is after something deeper, something more universal than that. This isn’t George or Kim’s movie. Instead, we witness it through the eyes of Miles. This is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen at capturing the way children interpret the world around them, and that’s due in large part to the simple, unadorned work of Erik Per Sullivan. He’s a natural presence, and he never oversells his big moments. He has a remarkable, easy chemistry with both actors playing his parents, and by putting him at the center of the film, Fessenden frees himself up to explore the way a shadow looks on a wall at night or the way things from our days make their way into our dreams and our nightmares.

When the family takes a trip into town for some supplies, Miles has an encounter in a store with an old Indian man who gives him a strange, handcarved statue of a Wendigo, a vengeful spirit. "Just because people don’t believe in spirits anymore doesn’t mean they aren’t there," he tells the boy, and Miles begins to carry the totem with him everywhere. The threats to his happiness are from inside the family as much as they are from outside, as George wrestles with his role as a father, trying to understand his son and genuinely listen to him. It’s great work by Jake Weber, who looks like the American Tim Roth to an almost spooky degree. Until now, I haven’t really taken note of Weber, but this is the kind of work that proves an actor is something special. It’s not a flashy role, but Weber makes it memorable and real. He and Clarkson are totally believable together, and their fights are as honest as their happy moments. There’s weight and history to this marriage, and Miles is the logical result, a kid born out of real love.

An afternoon of sledding kicks off the film’s final movement, and there’s both tragedy and horror in store for the family and for the locals, Otis in particular. I was impressed by the way Fessenden refused to give any easy answers about the spirit of vengeance in this film. Is it karma? Is it something that Miles summons? Or is it simply dumb luck that touches all of us at some point or another? The film is beautifully photographed, and at no point does there appear to be any limitations on Fessenden’s imagination due to budget. This is the kind of genre film that deserves real attention when it is released next year, and I hope to bring you more news and interviews regarding the film closer to its actual release.