Winterbeast

Winterbeast (released in 1992)

Dir and Written (and story by?) Christopher Thies

Starring Tim R. Morgan, Mike Magri, Charles Majka, Bob Harlow

            Sometime in 1986, a guy named Christopher Thies (no other credits) got together with some people, presumably his friends, and started to make a horror movie. Then they stopped. At some point in 1989, they possibly resumed for a brief period, and then they stopped again. And then years passed. And then in 1992, somebody else got ahold of the footage they’d shot and then released it like it was a real movie, under the title WINTERBEAST for what I’m sure are reasons which made perfect sense at the time.

            Well, there’s not a lot of Winter in WINTERBEAST, but at least the “beast” part checks out, because the first thing we see is some guy who appears to be a security guard but we’ll later find out is a park ranger, but we’ll also later find out this is a dream, so it’s possible that he’s actually a park ranger dreaming that he’s a security guard. Anyway, my point is, this guy’s a total beast. Check out that fly mustache:

(although sometimes, for example when the actor has clearly shaved it off in-between filming days, it looks more like this:)

             Anyhoo, either way, Beastiness confirmed. This is Ranger Bill Whitman (Tim R. Morton, WINTERBEAST), clearly the director’s most handsome friend, or at least the most handsome friend who was available weekends in both 1986 and 1989. But I suppose the title might also refer to the thing which is clearly right in front of him, but he doesn’t immediately see because he’s looking at another fellow who’s seated slightly to the right. Once he looks over, the thing he sees looks like this:

            I don’t know if that’s a beast or what, but it’s sure the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen less than 2 minutes into a horror movie. It wiggles around in its stop-motion glory for a few seconds, and then the other guy (possibly David Majka [whose real name, IMDB claims, is “David Mica” even though he has no other credits], WINTERBEAST) rips some skin off the gushing wound in his belly, and then Whitman screams, and... oh! It was just a dream, he wakes up in an undefined white space, clearly several years older. But just when you thought maybe WINTERBEAST was just fucking around, before this mustache guy can sit up and have a cup of coffee and consider the symbolic implications of this strange vision, or even reveal where he is or who he is or speak a single line of dialogue, whammo, out of the blue, there’s a little under five seconds of footage of some other guy (possibly also David “Mica” Majka?) somewhere else, with some kind of crazy muppet ripping its way out of his torso. This does not appear to be a dream, but it’s also not clear what it is or when it happened. If mustache guy is asleep, it’s probably nighttime, but the muppet-ripping is clearly a day scene. And we cut immediately from that day scene to another night scene, so it’s certainly not part of the same dream, and it’s also certainly not happening simultaneously, but that’s about all I can tell you, or will ever be able to tell you, about what the fuck is happening here.

            I have a theory, however, that the unfortunate victim of the fatal muppeting may be a man named, if the credits are to be believed, “Slappy Tello.” The reason I believe this is that in the next scene, the first to take place in any kind of clearly defined contemporary reality, we find forest Rangers Whitman and Stillman (Mike Magri, WINTERBEAST, here wearing Witness Protection sunglasses in every scene, even indoors at night) discussing a character named “Tello,” who will be referenced frequently and who appears in the credits but who will never definitively be introduced to the audience, making it likely --if far from certain-- that at least one of the two deaths we see in the first three minutes is the explanation for his disappearance.

            Or maybe not, because Ranger Bradford (Lissa Breer, WINTERBEAST), who was apparently with “Tello” when he “disappeared,” says nothing happened (despite the fact that she’s covered in blood), and that seems to satisfy Ranger Whitman’s curiosity (Ranger Stillman, for his part, seems content to peruse the ranger station’s surprisingly extensive collection of 1950’s era pornography through his ever-present cool guy shades). Content that they’ve done everything possible (nothing), and despite the fact that a man is apparently missing and there is a clearly traumatized victim of some kind of physical violence sitting in their office, Whitman and Stillman settle in for a night of small talk. Poorly-recorded community theater actors (at best) stepping on each others’ lines while sitting in underlit rooms framed in some hellish middle ground between a medium and long shot is, I admit, a pretty big part of WINTERBEAST. But it’s also kind of what you expect in an independent no-budget “American Regional Horror film” (as we now euphemistically refer to such things; see SATAN’S BLADE, for example). Some people find this sort of thing charming; most people who are not violent masochists find it absolutely stultifying. Either way, it’s par for the course. What WINTERBEAST has already done to shatter our expectations, though, is to throw two crazy gory monster scenes at us within the first minute that photographed images appear on-screen.* This establishes WINTERBEAST’s unique MO: endless scenes of mumbling nonactors stiffly reciting indecipherable nonsense, punctuated with almost completely random sequences where a cool stop-motion monster suddenly appears and eats someone we’ve never seen before and who is probably not ever going to be mentioned again.

For example, in-between two scenes of excruciating mumbled nonacting, suddenly we see a woman in an unidentified cabin (not specifically credited, which seems wrong considering this nice young lady was willing to take her top off for WINTERBEAST) take her top off and stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, like you do. Then, without warning, some kind of god damned crazy 20-foot tall anthropomorphized tree lumbers out of the woods in stop motion. She looks out her window and screams, then the damned thing reaches into what is clearly not the same cabin and pulls out an adorable fabric dolly which very clearly has its shirt on, smashes it against the wall, and splits. Scene over! Cut back to grueling chit-chat. We will never know who this woman was, we will never see the tree again, and none of this will ever be explicitly mentioned. As far as we know, this may be a completely unrelated event which just coincidentally happened to involve a giant stop-motion monster, and this is just a NASHVILLE-style series of vaguely interrelated vignettes about small-town life in Winterbeastville. Something like this happens once every 10 minutes or so of this 76-minute movie, so you’ve always got a new weird monster to look forward to, even if you’ve got to slog through a punishing volume of harrowingly dull dialogue scenes to get to them.

            This seems a completely reasonable trade-off to me, but it does make describing the plot an exercise in total futility; suffice to say, Whitman gradually becomes concerned that something unsafe is happening without ever specifically coming to the conclusion that the danger is related to stop-motion monsters, and his solution to this little problem is the classic JAWS approach: close the beach. Or in this case, shut down the building alternately called “Wild Goose Lodge” or “Wild Goose Lodges,” which he inscrutably seems to think is the source of the problem, or at least that shutting it down will somehow mitigate the danger. This canny strategy is understandably greeted with a sustained level of astonished fury from “Wild Goose Lodge(s)” owner and operator, Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow, in what is, to the indescribable detriment of mankind, his only known film role).

            Now we need to pause for a moment and talk about Mr. Sheldon. In a one-star review on IMDB user “vertigoboy1981” complains, “the villain is a gay Jewish guy,” two assertions for which I see no textual evidence. His other complaints, “It makes no sense… they all wear flannels, the acting is so bad, there is no plot,” all check out, so I have no choice to assume he’s writing in good faith from personal experience, but at least as far as the dialogue is concerned, Sheldon is neither gay nor Jewish. But I understand his confusion, and his blind, groping search for adjectives which convey what this guy’s deal is, because he’s quite a character. Let’s have a look at what we’re dealing with here:

          

            I have absolutely no idea how to categorize someone like Mr. Sheldon, but between his wild wardrobe, his enthusiastically high-camp line readings and his general appearance of being an aged and wizened Alfred E. Neuman, I wholeheartedly support whatever it is you would call whatever it is he’s doing. He’s the solitary source of human entertainment here, and so we’re totally on his side even as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s not just a greedy capitalist objecting to an overzealous Park Ranger shutting down his livelihood on vague suspicion that there might be monsters in the woods or something, he’s definitely up to no good. Our suspicions about his possible villainy stem from a sequence wherein Sheldon, dressed in some sort of remarkable plaid suit jacket, procures the recently deceased body of Ranger Bradford, suspends it with wires into the hostess stand at his lodge (?), assembles a group of never-before seen mummified corpses, and then proceeds to put on a record and sing the entirety of a creepy children’s diddy entitled Oh Dear! What Can The Matter Be? Just in case we had any lingering doubts about this concerning but not necessarily damning behavior, he then puts on a creepy clown mask.

So, definitely he’s part of the problem and not the solution here. When Whitman and his spectacularly uncharismatic friend Charlie who I’ve put off mentioning as long as possible considering he’s basically the co-lead here (Charles Majka, WINTERBEAST**) confront him in the middle of this production, he admits that it is his intention to bring demons “through the gate” (there has been no talk of a “gate” before, and there will be none after). Whitman very reasonably asks, “but why? Why would you want to do it?” By way of explanation, Harlow flashes back to a slightly extended sequence of that guy from the beginning who has the muppet pop out of him. Then he laughs and catches on fire and his face explodes. I’m on record as being generally against bringing demons through gates, but I gotta admit I like this guy’s style.

            Anyway, it seems like this is going to solve the problem, whatever it was. Whitman and Charlie seem to think so, because in the very next scene after they’ve left the site of a daemonical musical number / head burning, they have the following conversation over the phone:

            CHARLIE (picking up the phone): “Perkins’ general store.” [seems weird he would just go back to his day job the next morning after an experience like that, but Charlie is such a profoundly dull character that I must admit it’s plausible behavior for him]

            WHITMAN: “Charlie, this is Bill.”

            CHARLIE: “Hey what’s up? How’s business up at the lodge?”

            WHITMAN: “It’s a lot slower today with the weekend over. What are you doing?”

A rare frame with no visible plaid, though a guy wearing plaid just left. By the way, keep an eye out for that mounted deer head that always seems to be looking right at the audience; he'll turn up in multiple locations and is very possibly the evil mastermind behind all the horror.

            This seems a surprisingly mild reaction to what they’ve just seen.*** At first you figure hey, I guess they know what they’re doing. But they definitely don’t, because almost immediately they’re confronted by some kind of indescribable pissed-off four-armed skeleton/art piece that they describe as a “totem pole.” Stillman (largely absent from most of the film after making a strong impression early on) tries to chop it down, but it comes to life and he runs away, and nobody ever mentions it again. OK, that’s definitely less than ideal, but maybe it was an isolated incident. But then a gigantic lizard and a colossal chicken and so on show up to rampage around town, and we’re forced to admit that whatever it was with Sheldon melting didn’t turn out to be as definitive a solution as our heroes seemed to assume. You gotta take these things seriously, fellas.

In the end, after Stillman has his head bitten off by an iguana the size of a high-rise and half the town has been smashed, Whitman heads off into the woods to do... whatever is is he’s trying to do. He doesn’t offer a lot of explanation as to what he’s trying to accomplish. Whatever his plan was, though, it either goes perfectly or it doesn’t, because he’s attacked by a guy on stilts with a devil mask, who might well be the Winterbeast for all I know. Whitman is a guy who couldn’t even get a small-time hotel operator to close early after half a dozen people vanished, so it really doesn’t seem like he’s got much of a chance against this ancient Indian demon or whatever it is, but then just as things seem hopeless, that plaid-coated slab of pasty glucose Charlie shows up, and someone has the idea to shoot a flare gun at an ancient Indian mask that someone gave Charlie, apparently anticipating exactly this eventuality, and that causes the horn guy to have his face catch on fire and explode.

That didn’t work with Sheldon, but I guess it works here, because that’s the end of the movie. The two friends stagger to their feet, Whitman says, “next time, you hunt for bears!” which causes both of them to laugh uproariously, and off they go on their merry way, presumably forgetting that there’s still a giant four armed skeleton, a tree monster, a pissed-off ET, a colossal turkey, some kind of three-eyed chicken, a straight-up kaiju house-crushing lizard, a murderous zombie, and probably like five more weird stop motion things I have already forgotten still out there wreaking havoc on the town. But the movie has now reached the technical definition of feature length, and so sorting all that out will have to wait til the sequel.

            Objectively, WINTERBEAST is one of the most magnificently incompetent movies I have ever seen, and that’s really saying something. But I, for one, am not able to resist being won over by something this outlandish, especially when it sports such a menagerie of Ray Harryhausen delights, obviously lovingly crafted by… someone (the credits are awful short on details, listing no “Special Effects” credit). A typically unsourced bit of IMDB trivia claims “The totem pole monster and the skeleton head that rips out of a man's stomach are both props taken from the Dokken music video 'Burning like a Flame,'” which I can report, after suffering through nearly five minutes of Dokken, does appear to be plausible (see 3:05-3:17). But if that’s true they’ve been significantly redesigned for their big showcase here; It would be easy to just repurpose some old Dokken props as-is and call it a day, but WINTERBEAST is not gonna settle for that shit. Whatever WINTERBEAST's actual talents are, it never lacks in ambition. It knows, I think, that it’s not really going to be able to deliver on the drama, but that just inspires it to really go all-out on the whammy. To shoot for the absolute most possible weird monsters, and also quite possibly the highest volume of plaid by fabric yardage in film history. Just like mean old Mr. Sheldon, it is not good, or even sane, in the traditional sense, but dammit, I have to respect it.

* The first minute and a half of runtime are just the credits over a black background.

** Majka shares a last name with the actor credited as David Majka, but who’s real name is David Mica, according to IMDB. Don’t know what to make of that. But I do know that this Majka is the only cast member with any other IMDB credits of any kind: apparently he appeared (uncredited) in 2017’s Jack Black vehicle THE POLKA KING, ending a 25-year absence from the big screen.

***  I also don’t understand why Whitman appears to be working at the lodge now, because A) I thought he was a Park Ranger and B) didn’t he want the lodge closed? But that’s pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of movie nonsense. If I was willing to accept that this movie takes place in a universe where you can buy a plaid suit jacket, I can buy that Whitman has a second job as a hotel clerk.

This thing's in there, and I didn't even mention it and it's not even the best giant chicken in the movie. Listen, I think you should watch this.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	THE EVIL DEAD meets NORTHERN EXPOSURE.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a “Winterbeast” in the credits, but I sure couldn’t tell you which one it is, or why one beast is more important than the others.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None yet, but I still have hope.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Demons/ Stop-motion monsters
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Not even a C-lister in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Many monsters attack, but no animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	A zombie shows up for one scene and is never seen again
POSSESSION?	???
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None, though the implication that Sheldon is doing some kind of demon summoning.
MADNESS?	No, unless you consider wearing a clown mask and singing children’s songs to a group of dessicated corpses somehow psychologically unhealthy.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	It kinda seems like the thing at the end is transforming into something, but who knows.
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Stillman: "This backwoods bric-a-brac is nowhere in my book."