Oh my crap, where to begin with this…”movie.” It has so many serious problems, I can’t even decide which one is primarily at fault, but I think it’s a “flawed in its inception” issue, because the wendigo itself is kind of C-list as far as famous spirits go. It’s the Native American/northern plains version of the Jersey Devil or the banshee, in some ways, but with more of an emphasis on the humanity of the spirit and of its victims, and it’s strongly tied to the hunt and hunters in the legend. It’s not well known — I’m not Hans Holzer over here, but I’m pretty well versed in these legends and I had to look it up. Also: there’s no real consensus on how it manifests physically. Part of the point of the wendigo in N.A. culture is that it can take any form. So, it’s a problematic subject.

But Fessenden could have gotten away with it if he’d
1. introduced the wendigo itself in a timely fashion (we don’t see or hear about it even tangentially until 40 minutes into a 95-minute film);
2. understood how horror movies work in building suspense;
3. not shown the wendigo, which in this particular film manifests as a guy in not just one shitty deer suit but several different shitty deer suits, and no, I am not kidding;
4. ever watched a movie before. And I am not kidding with that, either.

The internal mythos of the movie is a fucking mess, and not to keep harping on this aspect of it, because, again, not Stephen King here, but when you work with this subject matter, it’s frustrating to watch someone else fuck it up with rookie mistakes. I had the same sensation watching the last two seasons of Buffy — every story needs a plan, but ghost stories, the plan has to be double-bagged. You have to know your internal logic, you have to know which elements of the legend you’re working with and which you’re throwing out because they’re too confusing, and you have to make that stuff clear to your audience from the jump, or we have no reason either to believe you or to care — and you can’t get bogged down in background on the characters, because horror is plot, period, and unless what someone does for a living is directly pertinent to the resolution of that plot, it’s wasting our time and sapping momentum. Decide what story you’re telling, and tell it; don’t do this write-by-numbers thing where you give us a bunch of tacked-on characterization that doesn’t matter — like, thanks for bogging us down in ten minutes of George’s frustrations as a photographer, but unless his photo proofs can kill the wendigo, we don’t give a shit and shouldn’t have to.

Six different guns in the first two acts, none of which related to each other, crowned by a seventh gun entirely going off in the third act; a dog’s breakfast of POVs that, instead of deepening the mystery, made it clear Fessenden wasn’t confident in his story; fancy stop-motion shots that he overused in place of plotting, ditto; overcasting the main roles (Patricia CLARKSON? Come on, lady); misuse of voice-over (you can’t flash back in VO to something the character didn’t say initially; it’s cheating, and either you don’t have a continuity editor or you think we’re stupid); non-credible parent-child interactions (Clarkson and Jake Weber both came off like stoner babysitters) — it’s just a disaster on every level. I know I shouldn’t care about a movie called Wendigo, but the thing is, the Hellraiser series is ridiculous on its face. The hero is credited as Pinhead, for chrissake. But those movies work. They know what they are and they execute thoroughly on that level. Wendigo is, like, a fourth-generation photocopy of the love child of Woody Allen and Kevin Smith, with some Oliver-Stone’s-The Doors-style shots of antlers edited in. Even the song over the credits is wrong; it’s all folky and chirpy, like, dude. The dad DIED. Get a boys’ choir up in here. And before you make another movie of any kind, watch everything Hitchcock ever made, twice, because you don’t know what you’re doing. (3/12/05)

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