Bad Movie Club: Winterbeast

1992 straight-to-video horror classic

Bad Movie Rating: 5/5 (Lisa: 3/5; Fred: 5/5; Josh: 4/5)

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some rangers try to get to the bottom of some stop-animated monsters killing people near a mountain lodge.

Low-budget enthusiasm and a love for Harryhausen propels this thing more than anything like narrative structure or character development. This is really poorly written, like the writer/director Christopher Thies had 1/8th of an idea, decided that was enough, and then made up the rest as he went along. This was Thies only movie, so you can understand why he would want to put every single monster he could think of in this movie. There's a tree demon, a fiend that kind of looked like E.T.,  some sort of totem pole with skulls thing, a dinosaur-looking creature, a few others. Those are all in stop-animated snippets that really made this movie the entertaining bad movie that it is. The monster/demon with the most screen time is a dude running around in a demon costume. The amount of monsters, most appearing only in a single scene, made the story a little confusing.

The acting and dialogue made the whole thing a little more confusing. I'm not sure the actors were in on the plot of the movie. And I'd love to hear Thies explain why this movie's called Winterbeast. It's not winter, and there are a bunch of beasts. And there's one guy with a creepy clown mask who starts performing a creepy interpretative dance halfway through the movie before his head explodes. Sorry. That's definitely a spoiler, and I should have warned you about it beforehand. There definitely is a point A in this story, and it progresses to a clear point Z, but all those points in between don't really seem to connect. Characters will witness some pretty shocking events and then never bother to mention them to the other characters. And I swear you could pull a lot of these individual sequences out of the movie, shuffle them around, and insert them in any order and still have about the same "story." It makes for a disjointed mess of craziness.

Other than the stop-animated monsters--my favorite moments being when they pick up a human who then turns into a stop-animated human--there's one performance that really makes this worth checking out. And no, that's not the Alien-esque monster-bursting-from-a-dude's-abdomen scene, something that is inexplicably shown near the very beginning as well as near the end. No, my favorite moment might be where the guy who runs the lodge, a character with as many flamboyant costume changes as there are monsters in this movie, performs that aforementioned interpretative dance. I never caught the character's name and just referred to him as "Andy Warhol" while discussing this movie with my Bad Movie Club friends, but he was always the most interesting character. I mean, at one point, he was dressed like Colonel Sanders, so if you want to argue with me about that, it's a losing battle. Anyway, the character who wore sunglasses throughout the entire movie is snooping around and catches him playing this creepy record and doing this dance, and the whole scene is just bonkers. A shrunken head and mask are also involved. I have to say--that scene really did manage to get under my skin.

Definitely recommended for fans of bad movies. You won't understand it, but you'll likely have fun watching it.

By the way, most of the actors in this did nothing else but this movie. Once exception is Charles Majka who did nothing else until 2017's Netflix original movie, The Polka King.