Phantom Menace

The Last Winter's Larry Fessenden envisions the end — with monsters.

by Sam Adams

DOOM ZOOM: "There's going to be this slow decay of everything we hold dear." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Call Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter an environmental fable, or call it the scariest thing since An Inconvenient Truth. Just don't call it a monster movie.

Set at a remote Alaskan outpost, the movie unleashes a long-buried spirit on a team of oil-company researchers, whose exploratory drilling has awakened its wrath. As the tension mounts between Ron Perlman's cigar-chomping despoiler and James Le Gros' enviro-minded scientist, the people around them are slowly losing their minds, messily killing themselves or simply vanishing into the Arctic wastes.

Fessenden doesn't shy away from creature-feature shocks, but the movie deliberately holds out the possibility that the team's encroaching madness has a scientific basis. And while horror-movie characters usually cling to rational explanations to shield themselves from the terror of the unknown, in this case the real-world threat is far more terrifying than its paranormal counterpart.

"Our psychological mechanism to deal with a troubled reality is that we start creating monsters and myths and angry gods," Fessenden says. "You always look for a scapegoat. It seems so hard to believe that the world could be utterly indifferent. You can imagine this avenging force all you want, but what it is is a collapse of the environment that we can function well in. Nature is just going about its business. We're the ones who are disrupting the patterns that have made life livable."

Fessenden's previous movies are stories of individual horror, but in The Last Winter, the perspective is objective, even alienated. Le Gros' scientist describes humanity as a malignant virus, one the earth will inevitably repulse. "It's a rather distant view of human behavior which is causing its own end," Fessenden says. "In a way, I didn't want to ally with any one character, since I felt they were all doomed, as we all are."

Fessenden is almost sanguine about the inevitable extinction of the human race. What terrifies him is the potential for social collapse triggered by vanishing fossil fuel reserves and escalating changes in climate. "It's not that we're all going to die someday," he says. "It's that there's going to be this slow decay of everything we hold dear. The death of the species — whatever. But there's going to be panic in the streets."

Despite his dire predictions, Fessenden laughs as he talks; the death of the planet is serious business, but that doesn't mean it has to be talked about in glum tones. Or addressed only by serious-minded documentaries and not, say, covertly brainy B-movies. After all, Fessenden admits, he could have simply dispensed with the monster altogether.

"I just love monsters," he laughs. "Can't I have any fun?"

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Last Winter opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See Cindy Fuchs' review.