I haven't forgotten about this blog. Subjects worth commenting that I haven't already done just seem to be coming in few and far between. That being said, this was a movie I was rather eagerly anticipating and was finally able to catch.
Spoilers Below!
A Guillermo Del Toro produced horror movie, so you know it's pretty good. In addition (and this isn't a spoiler for anybody who really knows their horror monsters) it's about the Wendigo, which is one of the few creatures that really gets to me.
The story is pretty straightforward, even if the characters it follows isn't conventional. (Though, Del Toro does have a habit of placing children as the main characters of horror movies. I'm looking at you, Pan's Labyrinth.) A couple junkies have set up a meth lab in an old mine, which ages ago was used to trap a Wendigo spirit. The men delved too greedily and too deep and the monster takes possession of one of them, killing the other and eating him. The man does manage to make it home, where he finds the will to not eat his two kids, locking himself in the attic of their house.
The story focuses on one of the two kids as he does his best to provide for himself and making sure to keep his dad fed, while still going to school. He doesn't do a very good job (I think the kid is supposed to be 9-ish.) and his teacher is suspicious that the boy is being abused.
That suspicion leads to people going to check on him at home, becoming a snack for his dad, and allowing the Wendigo to fully transform. All your usual monster shenanigans happens now, with the boy's teacher finally facing the creature and managing to kill it's current host.
With Del Toro's name, and one of my favorite monsters, I was really hoping for something to blow me away.
Now, This is a good movie. The cinematography is great, all the acting is good. I would definitely recommend this movie to any horror fan.
I do have several issues with it though.
The first thing I want to point out, because it stood out to me from the VERY beginning, and lingered the whole film, is that the movie is set in Oregon. The Wendigo is a creature from the Northern reaches. It's based on cannibalism, so dropping it into a state with mild winters doesn't make a lot of sense. It would be much more common in the territories of Canada, Alaska, or the Northeastern states. It's not even that being in Oregon is central to the story, the setting of the woods, the mountains, the water, the mine, all of that would actually be easier to find in Alaska. A lot of the panoramas even look like Alaska more than Oregon.
I also want to bring up the young boy's character switch at the end of the movie. Through most of the movie, he's displaying some serious abused / Stockholm syndrome about his father, saying lines like "As long as I feed him, he'll love me." At the end, though, at the last moment he switches sides and is instrumental in defeating the creature. There's nothing in the character throughout the whole movie to justify his sudden change of heart.
The music wasn't very memorable either, for example, as I sit here, I can't think of a single moment where I was even aware of the music or the sound. That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.
All that being said, altogether, it is a good little horror movie, but it's nothing spectacular. Worth watching while it's streaming to be sure. So turn it on, sit back for a bit, and enjoy.
