Winterbeast (USA, 1992)

I like to pick at least one film every year that I know will be awful. It can be boring writing nothing but positive reviews, and a stinker offers a chance to cut loose. This year’s sacrificial goat is Winterbeast.

Evan Dorkin mentioned Winterbeast when we discussed comedy-horror on the podcast earlier this year, comparing its stop-motion animation to that in Equinox. Nothing he said made me think this would be a good film, and yet I still feel he could have prepared me better. At the very least, however, it has given me an opportunity for a nice therapeutic rant.

Winterbeast is available on YouTube.

Synopsis

Aw, fuck. Are you really going to make me do this? I’m not sure anyone involved with the production could explain Winterbeast. This may be the least coherent film I’ve ever seen.

We’re dropped in at the deep end with a gory scene that doesn’t seem connected to anything that follows, but is striking. Then we join a couple of weirdly horny park rangers as they leer over skin mags, sharing wisecracks and unhelpful exposition. They are oblivious when a giant claymation monster snatches a topless woman from the room next door, but being oblivious to weird shit is a running theme here.

As the film limps along, we can kind of infer that tourists in this small New England community are disappearing, and the local lodge owner is doing a whole mayor-from-Jaws routine to stop the rangers from warning anyone. These disappearances are due to giant monster attacks, which seem related to a human sacrifice at a totem pole that no one actually seems bothered by. There is a long history of such disappearances, but it also seems to be a mysterious new problem. I don’t fucking know.

Anyway, a random library book tells one of the rangers that “The Indian gateway to Hell” might be open. The rangers are suspicious enough to break into the lodge in a very extra-judicial way, where they encounter corpses, puppets, corpse-puppets, and all manner of other weirdness. And then there are more monsters, a few deaths, and the film mercifully ends.

General Thoughts

That synopsis may give you the impression that Winterbeast has a story. It does not. Scenes just kind of happen, with no concern for context. Characters wander into the film, expecting us to know who they are, and often disappear just as abruptly. I’m not sure anyone involved even knows what editing is, and scenes go on long past the point where anything is happening. And every now and then you get the jarring insertion of some random stop-motion monster.

These monsters are perhaps the best part of Winterbeast, and certainly the only excuse for it existing, although they are still very amateurish. Whenever a creature mauls a human, it drags them from their live action shot, turning them into Gumby’s mutant cousin as they enter the world of clay. But whatever these scenes lack in quality, they more than make up for in quantity.

I get the impression the makers wanted Winterbeast to be a weird film. There are a couple of definite nods to Twin Peaks, but this is a very different kind of weird. In a film filled with unnatural horrors, the strangest thing is how little people react to them. Even when someone is directly attacked by a monster, they generally just throw themselves around the screen as we cut back and forth to the clay model. In one scene, someone pantomimes a car accident by just rolling out the door. It’s weird.

The only aspect of Winterbeast that feels like a horror movie is some shenanigans involving the lodge owner, where he wears a creepy mask and dances around with corpses. It is actually unsettling for a moment, particularly as he puppets the remains of one of the protagonists, but even this scene goes on for so long that it becomes daft.

Verdict

Sure, you may be drawn to watching Winterbeast by the same impulse that led our ancestors to visit freak shows, and it is truly an awful spectacle, but the incoherent scripting, ham-fisted editing, and the lack of any budget conspire to create something hallucinatory. Watching this film is a shamanic rite. You will not be the same person by the end.

Winterbeast is the kind of film where you know without checking that it’s the only IMDB credit for everyone involved. The lighting is inconsistent from shot to shot, and there are jarring shifts as the film stock and camera lenses change seemingly at random. The acting is beyond awful and the dialogue nonsensical. When they redub lines, there is no attempt to synch the sound to actors’ lips, creating uncanny ventriloquist routines. Mostly, however, when someone flubs a line, everyone just carries on. Retakes cost money, dammit!

I cannot think of one aspect of Winterbeast that works. And yet it is oddly watchable. While I don’t buy the idea of “bad enough to be good”, maybe a film can still be entertainingly awful. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, God help you.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Heretic (USA, 2024)
The Sadness (Taiwan, 2021)
The Uninvited (USA, 1944)
The Lodge (UK/USA, 2019)
WolfCop (Canada, 2014)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)
The Monkey (USA, 2025)
Sister Midnight (India/UK, 2024)
Roadgames (Australia, 1981)
Nightmare City (Italy, 1985)
Dangerous Animals (Australia, 2025)
Dead Talents Society (Taiwan, 2024)
Winterbeast (USA, 1992)
Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2013)
The Ugly Stepsister (Norway, 2025)
A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926)
Heart Eyes (USA, 2025)
Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)
Arrebato (Spain, 1979)
Hatching (Finland, 2022)
Abigail (USA, 2024)
Ganja & Hess (USA, 1973)
The Devil’s Bath (Austria, 2025)
Pieces (Spain, 1982)
Infested (France, 2023)
Best Wishes to All (Japan, 2022)
A Cat in the Brain (Italy, 1990)
Enys Men (UK, 2022)
Creature From the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954)
Perewangan (Indonesia, 2024)
Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.