James Hoffman (James Le Gros) is posted at a remote Arctic oil drilling base to evaluate its environmental impact and he inevitably clashes with Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), who is the tough chief of the crew. Pollack just wants Hoffman to rubber-stamp the operation so that drilling for oil can begin, but the environmentalist doesn’t want to play ball.
Is this going to be ‘The Last Winter’?
With people behaving strangely, going missing and dying, Hoffman hypothesises that a type of natural gas is leaking from the permafrost due to the effects of climate change: this sour gas could be the reason people are having hallucinations and acting oddly.
As weird events continue, characters ponder whether nature has turned against all of mankind and maybe we’re approaching a ‘Last Winter’ – when the ‘spirits/ghosts’ of the creatures that comprise fossil fuels rise up to kill us.
A spectral caribou-creature approaches…
Shot in Iceland and Alaska, Larry Fessenden’s movie is an intriguing and pretty effective slow burn film, featuring decent acting and some briefly-seen spectral caribou creatures seemingly released from the earth to avenge man’s destruction of the environment.
People start turning up dead
The spirit-creatures are only hinted at through most of the film, presented occasionally as some kind of swirling spirit-storm, but we do get a good look at several of the large, ghostly caribou-things a couple of times later in the story and, for the most part, they look okay, though there’s some dodgy CGI featured in one particular overhead shot when the creatures close-in on a character.
What is this thing?
Ron Perlman’s performance is rather one-note – but, as a whole, THE LAST WINTER is a quite satisfying, modestly budgeted, eerie movie – though I feel the makers didn’t quite know how to deal with the creatures once they are properly revealed onscreen. The film, however, is certainly way, way better than Fessenden’s killer fish movie BENEATH (2013).
In a pre-title sequence two desperate men are shown eating part of a dead colleague on a snow-covered mountain. A third man refuses to take part in this. When the three men walk onwards, the two who had eaten the flesh start acting scared, as if they can see something up ahead. The man who’d not succumbed to cannibalism can’t see what is pursuing the others. This unseen force lifts up one of the flesh eaters, throws him to the snowy ground and bloodily rips into him.
Only those who’ve eaten human flesh can see the creature…
…and it hunts them down and kills them
The movie now switches location to the UK and we watch Ethan (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni) devising a way to get his girlfriend Nat (Megan Purvis) out of the mental health facility she is currently staying in. The couple have planned this escape so that Nat can celebrate her birthday with a bunch of friends on a weekend camping trip.
The land they are camping on is owned by Blackwood (David Patrick Stucky), who we recognise as the surviving flesh eater from the opening sequence. Blackwood generously offers the campers a container of raw hamburger patties. The friends enjoy this free meal, unaware that the burger patties contain human flesh…
Don’t eat the burgers!
Blackwood reappears and tells the group what they’ve eaten – and he explains that the local woodland is inhabited by a creature that hunts and kills anyone who has consumed human flesh. Blackwood’s plan is to use the friends as offerings, hoping that the monster (that has presumably stalked him from the mountains) will gorge on them and will leave him alone for a while.
The creature looms over a victimFang-face!
The friends must now try to keep out of the creature’s clutches, and this really should’ve provided the film with lots of opportunities to give us tension and action, but there’s a fair bit of running time where not much happens and we get characters having “you weren’t there to help”-type drama moments instead.
Brother and sister have a ‘you-weren’t-there-for-me’ moment
The movie inevitably ends with a final girl confronting Blackwood and dealing with the pursuing creature.
Nat covers herself in another victim’s blood
This low budget movie looks okay visually, has practical effects and features a decent synth score by Gabe Castro, so it’s a shame a lot of the film is basically a bunch of rather one-note characters walking and running about in the woods.
Nat ignites a signal flare
What I liked most about the movie was the central idea, which is pretty cool: if you eat human flesh you will be hunted down and killed by a creature that ONLY cannibals can see (non-cannibals can only see the victims being attacked, with the creature remaining invisible to them).
The suggestion that the creature can’t see you if you cover yourself with a dead person’s blood doesn’t seem well thought-through, however. Surely most cannibals get covered in a dead person’s blood (because they’re eating a corpse), so this must be a real problem for a creature that only hunts down cannibals!
The guy with the rifle can’t see the monster holding up Ethan because he hasn’t munched on human fleshThe creature gets up close and personal
This monster is a humanoid creature with a big, tooth-filled mouth, but it is never seen as clearly as depicted in the film’s poster: it is always shot cloaked in shadows, filmed from a distance, or shown in extreme close-up.
The poster showed the beastie far more clearly
In the end the movie just fails to be very memorable, which is a pity, as it had potential.
Zack Snyder’s big-scale, loud, macho zombies-in-Vegas popcorn flick has hit Netflix, so here are my thoughts concerning this zombie/heist/father-daughter-reunion movie…
Colourful poster!
(SPOILERS ahead)
There was stuff I liked about ARMY OF THE DEAD and stuff that I didn’t, so let’s begin with what I liked:
PROS
The ‘world’ of the movie is great: the wrecked vistas of a zombie-infested Las Vegas provide lots of opportunities for eye-candy views of damaged buildings and toppled casino signs.
The smashed-up Vegas location is cool
Matthias Schweighöfer provides a humorous counterpoint to the tough, posturing mercs as the out-of-his-depth German safecracker Dieter.
Dieter was my favourite character
The semi-rotted Siegfried & Roy zombie white tiger is a novel visual touch.
An undead white tiger. Nice
The zombie tiger chillin’
The nuking scene at the end was okay because, well, a nuke going off in a movie is almost always a cool moment!
Boom!
CONS
Dave Bautista is brilliant in the right role, such as Drax in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, but here he doesn’t seem to have the acting chops to handle the scenes where his daughter hits him with the ‘you-weren’t-there-for-me’ accusations.
Talking of which, I found all the ’emotional’ father-daughter scenes somewhat forced.
“You weren’t there for me, dad…” etc, etc
Omari Hardwick’s character is shown using a cool circular saw as a weapon to kill zombies during the opening credits. This saw is highlighted several times as one of the tools being taken on the heist… and yet Hardwick NEVER gets to use it on the zombies later in the story. Let-down!
The saw should’ve been used like this during the heist!
The Alpha Zombies. Okay, for me, zombies should NOT leap around the place like a modern dance troupe! I definitely don’t think a lead zombie should wear a cape & metal mask, roar like a dinosaur, show feelings, ride a zombie horse and be able to reproduce with lady zombies! These Alpha Zombies stop being undead zombies and pretty much act more like something akin to the possessed humans in GHOSTS OF MARS (2001).
Mask-wearing Alpha ZombieZombies with feelings?An undead dude on an undead horse
Why does Snyder keep shooting stuff out of focus in this film? He does this loads of times! At first I thought he was trying to indicate that one of the characters was losing their eyesight.
Blurry…
When it is revealed that the ACTUAL reason for the incursion into the walled-off zone was to acquire blood from an Alpha Zombie (which could be used for some kind of weaponised zombie military program), I just couldn’t help thinking there MUST have been a less convoluted way of getting access to an Alpha Zombie.
Off with her head
I know this might come across as a bit petty, but I thought the actress playing the Alpha Zombie queen REALLY overacted – all of the time!
The ever-posturing Alpha Zombie queen
So, I guess there were more elements I didn’t like than stuff that I did. It’s a shame, but there are too many things that bugged me, including all the stupid decisions characters make in the movie, presumably so Snyder can move it in the direction he wanted.
The scenes showing the military fighting hordes of zombies in Vegas during the credits were so good I felt that a heist story was kind of a letdown in comparison. It would’ve been great to have seen those battles, which are just hinted at in the credits, where we see a poor paratrooper floating down into a sea of undead, the main Las Vegas drag getting napalmed, etc.
Big-scale battle action during the creditsA paratrooper drops into mass of zombies (also in the credits)
If you like larger-than-life, computer game-like movies with muscled dudes firing off automatic weapons, this could well be the movie for you.
Hey, wrecked Vegas looked cool, whatever you think of the rest of the movie…
Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) and Dr David West (Edward Judd), along with his new girlfriend Toni Merrill (Carole Gray), travel to an island off the coast of Ireland to look into the case of a dead local man… who has been discovered with no bones in his body.
A boneless corpse
With the help of local doctor Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne), they find out that a group of researchers, seeking a cure for cancer in a secluded laboratory on the island, have accidentally created creatures that absorb all the bones from their victims.
The researchers fall victim to their own experiment
As the island becomes infested by these ‘silicates’, the protagonists must try to discover a way to stop these starfish-blob-like creatures, which have hardened, knobbly skin carapaces and a single, central tentacle that they use to inject bone-dissolving enzymes into their victims.
These critters are a favourite of mine
Axes, shotguns, petrol bombs and dynamite have no effect on these slow, slithering critters, but Stanley and West come up with a solution that involves poisoning the silicates with Strontium-90. As the islanders gather together in a building, with the monsters crawling all over it, the heroes wait to see if their plan will actually work…
Another shot of a silicate because, well, why not?
I like this flick quite a bit!
The silicates make a very distinctive sound (I’m a sucker for creatures that make peculiar noises, such as the ants in THEM!), which imbues the scenes with a certain creepiness and adds tension too, because once you hear the sound you know a silicate is nearby! Barry Gray, who did the scores for Gerry Anderson productions like STINGRAY, UFO, THUNDERBIRDS, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN and SPACE: 1999, provided the electronic sound effects.
Don’t let the tentacle touch you!
The silicates are very slow moving, which I actually like, because – as with un-speedy Romero zombies – I think more anxiety is created when the heroes should be able to keep out of reach of the creatures but you just KNOW the critters are still going to sneak up on them somehow.
The local policeman becomes the next victim
The silicates have an unusual way of multiplying, which involves each creature splitting into two every six hours or so. This adds a ticking clock element to the plot, as the protagonists need to deal with this threat before the silicates exponentially grow in number until there’s a million of them. A couple of the creatures are shown subdividing, which calls for the production of milky goo and what looks like tinned spaghetti!
This scene probably put some people off spaghetti for good!
Cushing, Judd and the rest of the cast, including Niall MacGinnis, treat their roles seriously, in a plot that is like a Hammer Films-style horror yarn mixed with a 1950s-era scientists-versus-an-experiment-gone-wrong story.
During the finale, with the besieged islanders seemingly doomed to be overwhelmed by the silicates, there’s a moment where Judd and Cushing decide that it’s best for Carole Gray’s character to be given a lethal injection, rather than risk death-by-silicate. Judd doesn’t inject her at the last moment, because the creatures start to die from radiation poisoning, but it was pretty presumptuous of him to decide to kill her without her consent!
Gotcha!
Director Terence Fisher made another blob-monsters-on-an-island movie for Planet Film Productions, called NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT (known as ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED in the US). But ISLAND OF TERROR is the better film, with such fun moments as a silicate dropping onto an islander from a tree and some brief shots of rubbery, boneless victims, plus there’s a little bit of gore, as Edward Judd is forced to chop off Peter Cushing’s hand before a silicate can digest his bones.
Cushing gets nabbed by a tentacle…
…so his hand has to be chopped off!
To finish, here are a bunch of posters, some of which misleadingly suggest the movie will feature female nudity!
A search team looking for missing geologists in an African desert encounter a swarm of black particles/creatures that eat the flesh off victims and then wrap around the bones to become ambulatory monsters.
Ignore this poster: the creature is not a swarm of ants
The team discovers flesh-stripped corpses
The team starts getting picked off by these things and they eventually have a showdown in an abandoned mine, where it is discovered that the black swarm is controlled by a balloon-sized, egg/cocoon-like hive-mind kind of thing.
The black mass of ‘particles’Consumed by black stuff in his sleeping bag!A victim gets his arm eaten by the swarm
Director Jason Wulfsohn’s film isn’t perfect, with rather forced tension amongst the characters, resulting in an overabundance of bickering. However, there is stuff to like too. The cinematography, aided by the desert location, is decent and the acting’s okay, with Warrick Grier standing out for me as Karl: the gung ho, trigger-happy member of the team.
Warrick Grier plays gun-toting Karl
The film remains watchable mainly because of the creatures, which look pretty good: a mix of flowing black particles and pieces of skeletons or body parts (such as a victim’s face, or a fleshless skull, etc). If a creature gets shot it simply reverts back to a mass of particles and seeps back into the desert, leaving the gnawed bones behind that it had been using as its own temporary skeleton. These creatures really should have had more screen time. Shame.
One of the creatures just before it is shot
A memorable moment occurs when one of these bone snatcher creatures approaches the main characters in the night, wearing the face of one of their friends. It then proceeds to disgorge a squirming mass of black particles from the mouth of its flesh-mask!
A bone snatcher critter wears their team mate’s face!Barfing up some more black particles. NiceA fleshless skeletonA creature looms over KarlCreature-vision POVThe lil’ blobby hive-mind
I feel the origin of these particle-things would have worked better if it had been some kind of African supernatural force, which was hinted at when the characters encounter a bunch of strange, bug-eyed totems in the desert. The final revelation that the black swarm is controlled by a small, orange blob-sack hive-mind (that can just be stabbed) comes across as rather underwhelming.
Mysterious carved totems in the desertSo this is the big, bad controller of the creatures?!
In the Love, Death + Robots season 2 episode SNOW IN THE DESERT, an albino wanderer known as Snow lives on a hot, barren planet and must deal with various bounty hunters who want to kill him so that they can attain a certain part of his anatomy…
His name is Snow and he lives in the desert
Snow, it transpires, has lived hundreds of years: this is due to the fact that he can endlessly regenerate his cells and body parts, thanks to special hormones released in his testicles. This pretty much makes him immortal – and it also means there are people who want to get rich by acquiring his balls to access a never-ending supply of Snow’s unique genetic material. This is why there are always bounty hunters on his case, but now a young woman called Hirald, who works for an advanced AI within Earth’s government, enters Snow’s life…
What is Hirald’s secret?
Based on a short story by Neal Asher and, like a lot of his work, set in a future history known as the ‘Polity’ universe, this Netflix animated short features super-realistic mo-cap characters and impressive vistas, created by 3-D animation studio Unit Image.
This planet is hotThese bounty hunters have a cool ‘skinned alive’ look!Saggy-skinned alien dude
The action is very brutal and there’s some cool world-building, with the inclusion of various alien races, including a rock-skinned bounty hunter, and some local vulture-like creatures. There’s a nice touch concerning these flying creatures, when we see them cover themselves completely with their leathery wings to endure the desert planet’s hot midday sun.
These reptile-vulture creatures know that the sun is about to rise……so they wrap themselves up in their leathery bat-wings!
On the whole, the short comes across as a taster for what to expect in the Polity universe, but there are some twists and turns in the brief story, as we discover Snow’s abilities and are finally shown Hirald’s true self – and, of course, you get 18 minutes of sci-fi eye candy.
More bounty hunters arrive
Here are some (spoiler-ific) shots from the story’s finale…
A rock-fleshed bad guy! Brutal sci-fi action!Hand through the villain’s chest!Ah! Hirald is part machine!Romance!Sunrise on a happier future for Snow?
What movie could this possibly be for?! The lobby card features what seems to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon…
Should this creature be hanging out in the Black Lagoon?
And it also includes these weird faces…
…and yet another weird, fanged face and a guy wearing modern scuba gear…
…plus a seal fighting a shark…
…and a B&W inset picture from what seems to be a Japanese film…
Well, it turns out that the film the lobby card is meant to be depicting is the period fantasy CITY UNDER THE SEA (1965)!
Released as WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP in the US, this British-American movie starred Vincent Price, Tab Hunter and David Tomlinson in a tale about a lost city beneath the sea off the Cornish coast in England.
The movie featured some gillmen (who definitely didn’t resemble the Creature from the Black Lagoon!), an undersea volcano and a pet chicken. The story centred on the film’s protagonists discovering a group of men living in underground/undersea ruins: these men did not seem to age, thanks to a weird mix of gases in the caverns and subterranean rooms they dwelt in.
Here’s a UK poster…
Here’s a US poster…
Nice illustration!
And here’s an Australian poster…
‘Not suitable for children’!
But, let’s face it, nothing can compare to this insanely inaccurate lobby card from Mexico!
Two brothers, called Sedgewick and Fletcher, have recently moved to an ice-covered planet, where they try to fit in with the other youths already living in a grim, industrial factory base.
The base is pretty uninviting
Fletcher is the cooler of the two brothers and is ‘modded’, whereas Sedgewick is not genetically modified and is looked down upon by the locals.
Even though Fletcher doesn’t think it is a very good idea, Sedgewick tags along with his brother and takes part in a race across ice flows, beneath which massive marine creatures called Frost Whales swim.
Everyone but Sedgewick is modded and they soon begin their dangerous race, which involves keeping ahead of the Frost Whales that always smash into the thick ice seven times before crashing through it to jump skywards.
Towards the end of the icy run Fletcher gets injured, so Sedgwick grabs him and carries him to safety, just as the Frost Whales begin breaching. Sedgewick is now respected by the locals and the group head back to the base after their adventure.
I love the look of these massive vehicles
ICE is a 13 minute episode from the second season of the Netflix animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS and is an interesting mix of styles.
The characters have a look reminiscent of stylised Jamie (Gorillaz) Hewlett drawings, whilst the machinery trundling around the industrial base has a more realistic feel: these massive oil rig-like contraptions on enormous caterpillar tracks look pretty impressive.
Future youths
The Frost Whales, however, are even more striking visually, as they leap from the ice and are lit by some kind of phosphorescent lighting.
These Frost Whales are so cool!
ICE, made by Passion Animation Studios, possesses an okay story, but you’re far more likely to remember the episode because of those majestic breaching alien whales at the culmination of the tale.
On a snowy Christmas Eve, a young brother and sister quietly sneak downstairs to hopefully get a fleeting glimpse of Santa as he leaves presents under the christmas tree. But they actually discover that ol’ Saint Nick is a grotesque-looking, raw-fleshed, toothy creature!
What’s lurking behind the christmas tree?
ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE is a 7 minute episode from the second season of Netflix’s animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS and it wonderfully mixes cuteness with creepiness.
The creature knows if you’ve been good…
Directed by Elliot Dear, this animated short from Blink Industries first hints that we’re not going to see your typical Mr Clause when a long, prehensile probe-tongue snakes onto the screen to suck up the milk and snatch away the cookies that’ve been left out for hungry Santa!
The tongue-tentacle appears
The gift-giving creature is a marvellous creation: it has a toothy maw reminiscent of the eyeless, tooth-faced alien from THE DEADLY SPAWN (1983), mixed with some overlong forelegs that make it look a little like the critter in CLOVERFIELD (2008). Actually, this festive beastie also reminds me quite a bit of the large, pink-skinned thing featured in METAMORPHOSIS: THE ALIEN FACTOR (1990). This santa-beast also possesses human-like arms & hands that it uses in an amusing, expressive way!
The weird creature approaches the kidsJazz hands!
Anyway – regardless of exactly which previous movie monsters reminded me of this episode’s cool, novel-looking creature – ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE proves to be a short, sweet, semi-scary treat that reveals how we actually get our presents: a xenomorph-like monster vomits-up the perfectly-wrapped gifts in a stream of saliva!
This is for you…
At the end of the story the creature growls the children’s names as it coughs-up their presents, tells them that they’re good, then crawls up the chimney. Once the beast has gone the sister is left to ask the question: what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been good?
A passenger (resembling H.P. Lovecraft) leaves his carriage to have a smoke when the train he is travelling on briefly breaks down in a field of tall grass.
Disregarding the train conductor’s request not to wander from the train, the man walks into the prairie and notices strange lights amongst the grass… so he treads further into the field and he finally encounters a white-skinned humanoid creature with a featureless face.
The passenger should’ve listened to the conductor and not strayed from the train……but he does walk into the field……and he paces further into the long grass……and he encounters one of the creatures!
More of these pale-fleshed beings crawl out of the dirt within the field and they chase the passenger through the grass! We now see that the faces of the creatures are not totally featureless: big, gaping mouths full of masses of sharp teeth can be seen as the beings close-in on the terrified passenger.
So many teeth!
The man is dragged to the ground and is overwhelmed by the creatures, but the train conductor intervenes, saving him. When both men manage to get back onto the train, which is finally heading away from the prairie, the conductor says that he believes this area of grass is some kind of portal to another world – and these humanoid creatures are transformed people who became lost there in the past.
The creatures close-inThe train conductor comes to the rescue with a flaming torch……because he knows the creatures don’t like fire
A satisfying 11 minute horror short, this episode from season 2 of the Netflix animated anthology series LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS has a unique animation style that I prefer to the more photorealistic animation seen in other episodes in the series.
Based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story of the same name, this is a straightforward, simple but effective tale, made by Axis Animation, that is full of mood, mystery and monsters.
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien. Plus monsters from other media too, including books and comics.
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