The lighting is bad and the editing is worse. The best acting performance here is still awful. The primitive stop-motion special effects might have been cool thirty years before. The script feels like it was written in less time than it takes to see the movie. It’s not a great film, this Winterbeast, but few directors have ever fought longer through a low-budget production to get a movie made and that makes it inspirational. Christopher Thies spent six long years just shooting this story of what happens when monsters that sprout from old Indian totem poles start biting peoples heads off in a small town and, oh boy, can you tell. The film format changes often, sometimes in mid-scene. Then there’s the lead character’s infamous mustache, which changes size, thickness and even color back-and-forth throughout. One suspects that Thies spent so long making the film that the story eventually became meaningless to him. It becomes meaningless to us, too, right from the beginning when two actors who can’t act have a conversation that feels like it goes on for fifteen minutes. From there, you know exactly what to do: Sit back and savor the badness. Slip into another dimension and don’t look for anything to make sense. On that level, this is a fun trip.
It’s the only film credit from Christopher Thies and nearly everyone else involved… UNLESS they’re making another movie right now and they’re in their fifteenth year of production. Nobody looks the same was when they started shooting and the last known copy of the script got lost sometime in 2006. They’re almost done, though (they’ve been “almost done” for eight years) and it’s going to be their masterpiece.