Macabre…ish Horror Review: The Last Winter

The Last Winter, 2006/ 1 hr 41 min

An American oil company is building and ice road to explore a remote Arctic Refuge and independent environmentalists at the base of operations. Maxwell heads out to inspect a drilling site and returns delirious and traumatized. He says he saw something and warns them not to drill there and sound the alarm.

Of course, they don’t and Maxwell, strips naked and takes a camera to record the phenomena at the site. When he’s found dead later, they chalk it and his delirium up to natural gas being released by climate change.

Soon the rest of the group begins to hallucinate and very often a large herd of caribou runs by camp. Right after that, everything bad that could happen, does. People start going insane, disappearing, dying, killing each other. A bush plane comes in with staff and not only crashes but crashes into their building, damaging it.

It’s a domino effect of one bad thing after another. After a while, one wonders if it’s bad luck or nature, has turned against mankind. Another abandoned arctic shack is found with it’s notes and research still there and suggests that the Earth is releasing something that is infecting the virus that is human kind, that there is no escape. Humans released this evil, we brought this on ourselves.

This movie feels like someone wanted to make another The Thing inspired movie but without actually copying it. The feel is almost the same and instead of aliens it’s nature and madness. This is very much a slow burn thriller and though we do not have to wait long for something to happen, you have to watch this closely to the end for it to come together. The effects are pretty good and it’s not particularly graphic or gory, it’s easy to watch as far as that goes. I did have to watch this twice because I got lost in the story. As far as cast, there is Ron Perlman, Larry Fessenden, Jamie Harold and Connie Britton.