Wendigo: Scary Deliverance

Writing credits Larry Fessenden

Patricia Clarkson .... Kim Jake Weber .... George Erik Per Sullivan .... Miles John Speredakos .... Otis Christopher Wynkoop .... Sheriff Tom Hale Lloyd Oxendine .... Elder Brian Delate .... Everett

R 91 min

http://www.thewendigo.com/

Artisan Home Entertainment tries to get one RIGHT for a change with one of its recent offerings, Wendigo. And I've got to admit, if you judge solely by the DVD menu they've got a real winner on their hands for once. The menu comes packed with a montage of vaguely interconnected scenes that let you know, in no uncertain terms, that SOMETHING IS REALLY VERY WRONG HERE and that you'll probably want to find out just what. An effective use of background music, especially if you have the surround sound equipment to back it up, augments the eerie atmosphere the menu projects.

And when you finally push the play button, a series of playing cards appears on the screen before finally launching the movie. A clever touch, I think...it adds that extra note of "hey, what's going on here, anwyay?"

But what we've got here is the start of a family vacation that will a little too obviously be Going Very Wrong (tm) shortly.

And indeed, it does. When the family car accidentally collides with a deer on the road, it also causes the family to run afoul of a hunting party that had been tracking the victim deer for several hours.

Now, I don't know how many of you are deer hunters, but living in a state that considers Opening Day of Deer Season a marginal state holiday, I can understand and tell you that these guys are gonna be sublimely pissed off. Indeed, one of them, Otis, is profoundly pissed off, making several threatening gestures with his scoped rifle in the father of our family's direction.

And Otis isn't the type to give up without a fight--the family reaches its temporary residence and finds a bullet hole in the window.

And a bullet embedded in the wall.

Yipes, buddy! You've just taken your family on a vacation in the Cahulawatchee River valley!

This leads to the discovery of what's causing most of the bizarrities in the area--the Wendigo. I hand it to Artisan here for actually making the story connect with other similar wendigo stories, especially as in the one offered up in Ravenous. This is almost identical to Ravenous' story of the mythical beast.

The most bizarre part of the movie comes about an hour in, when Miles (played handily by Malcolm in the Middle's Erik per Sullivan) is chased through the woods by twigs. Seriously. The shot is of course a first-person shot chasing Miles, but all we see are a couple of twigs in the shot. There's nothing more indescribably weird than this.

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