"Winterbeast" is the kind of movie you watch and just want to meet the cast and crew of immediately, and learn more about the making of it. I'm not sure where to even start, so I guess I'll just lay out the story. After a strange nightmare-sequence opening (where we are treated to our first experience of the quirky and horrendous stop-animation special effects) we meet Rangers Whitman and Stillman at the Rangers Station up on a mountain somewhere. Whitman is an intense and brooding character who takes his Park Ranger job with the utmost seriousness. The sunglasses-wearing Stillman is a pure ape, and would rather sit in the station and read his porn-mags than do any kind of community liaison. Which is tough, because one of their colleagues has gone missing, and pretty soon, more people at the mountain resort begin to go missing, too. Whitman decides it's time to shut down the resort. Stillman could care less. The hub of this resort is the local inn run by the camp, nasty and highly eccentric Dave Sheldon (What a performance from Bob Harlow. More on him later), but he is having none of it, and hampers their efforts to close the mountain down. But fairly soon, missing people begin to turn in to dead people, and it comes to light that there are ancient spirits out in the woods responsible for the carnage, manifesting themselves in monsters and possessed Totem poles.
The special effects, first of all. Absolutely diabolical. But unique! These guys did not give a hoot. "Winterbeast" was made (half-heartedly) over a number of years between 1986 - 1989 and my understanding of it is that by the end of it, original footage etc. had been lost or ruined and so Christopher Thies just ran what he could through and filled the gaps with stop-motion animation. All the action and dead scenes are made from clay and are absolutely hilarious. The acting is atrocious, for the most part. Tom Morgan is extremely rigid and awkward as Sergeant Whitman, but he is a joy to watch. Bob Harlow is actually very good and is the best thing about the film. What a nasty and menacing character he creates. His arguments with Whitman over the closing down of the inn are terrific. They really go at it in these scenes! It was like something you'd see in your day-to-day life, with Harlow's pitch getting louder and louder and the tendons in his neck nearly bursting out until the two are literally unrestraint and screaming at one another. It's terrible acting, of course, but by god it is entertaining.
As I mentioned earlier this was made over a number of years and as a result it gives the impression of a project that was passed from one film-student to another. The film varies in quality and changes sometimes in mid-scene. The best example of this is, I think, during one of the aforementioned bust-ups between Whitman and Sheldon. The camera angle suddenly changes and the footage goes from the normal-looking cheap kind to a sepia-grain tone. Made me wonder if perhaps half of that scene was filmed in '86 and the rest of it was added in years later, maybe after the original reel was damaged or what not. To sum it up, "Winterbeast" is like "Plan 9 to Outer Space". Highly deplorable film-making from a technical point, but highly enjoyable. However, "Winterbeast" is extremely obscure and thus not as accessible as "Plan 9...". It simply faded into celluloid-sludge obscurity along with a mass cohort of similarly low-budget, straight-to-VHS, horror flicks from this time, that are now a joy to seek out. The majority are unredeemable, but you do find the odd gem like "Winterbeast".
