"The Last Winter" has an effective build up. It's not completely original, mind you. We have seen that kind of setting before, in "The Thing" and a dozen other movies where a crew is isolated in a strange place where weird things start to happen. It's the memory of those far superior movies that make this one watchable at first. However, the story drags on and it all goes downhill soon.

The mysterious ongoings aren't really that intriguing, and they get less intriguing the more they are exposed. On top of that, Ron Perlman's character is annoying and unbelievable. He's just a constant pain in the a.., just for the hell of it. The worst part about "The Last Winter", however, is the resolution or rather the lack thereof. It seems as if director/writer whatshisface hadn't thought the whole thing through and just decided to go ahead with filming because the topic of global warming is so trendy right now.

Well, it's a pity. "The Last Winter" could have been a solid mystery/thriller. Instead it's an unsatisfying waste of your time. There are far too many good movies out there waiting to be watched for you to rent this one.

Eco horror film about the advance team from an oil company finding that the Alaskan wilderness is turning against it. Ten years earlier a test well had been drilled and what it found was kept secret. Now after years of negotiations and behind the scenes dealing the advance group from Northern Industries is preparing the way for full scale drilling. Arriving back from headquarters big wig Ron Perlman finds things are beginning to go amiss. The temperature is climbing despite it being February, its raining and more than one of the people in his crew is acting strange.

Well made and well acted this film works for about 45 minutes until one of the crew, who had gone mysteriously missing, begins to go on about strange forces and "don't you see it". No we don't. And thats the problem. much of this film we don't see anything. To be certain we do see the guy wander into the waste and freeze to death and we see his lifeless corpse moved around, and we see the ominous animals,we see the deaths and we hear the scary words about the planet in revolt, but we don't see anything that makes sense. For whatever reason none of it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. Its formless dread that never takes form, and while our lives are often controlled by it, you can't make a movie about it. To be honest I started not to pay attention in the last 35 or 40 minutes. The mood was good, but it just wasn't scary because the reason for the fear, other than clever film-making, was missing.

I'll try it again down the road, but for now I consider it a misfire. (Also in fairness a friend at work really really liked it)

A slapdash combination of monster movie and environmentalist message movie, it has little to recommend it. Al Gore had been giving his popular presentation on global warming for a year or so and was to win an Academy Award for it in 2006, the same year this was released. It looks like a hastily put-together attempt to cash in on legitimate concerns about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A team of half a dozen or so, including an environmental scientist, are exploring the drilling possibilities in Northern Alaska. The team is diverse. There's an Inuit woman, a sexy woman, and various other characters led by the gruff and skeptical Ron Perlman.

Look out for this spoiler. I feel compelled to add that warning although there's not much doubt that the seasoned viewer will be able to see the ending coming.

One by one, something terrible happens to the team members. The first of them, a man, strips naked and walks off into the unending snow fields, after muttering about "something out there" and positing some kind of sour gas (hydrogen sulfide) seeping out of the ground. If he were correct about the gas, everybody would know about it. It has the smell of rotten eggs and turns nickels black. The next bleeds to death from his nose. By this time even Perlman is irritated and calls for help. Alas, the incoming airplane crashes into the base and burns everything up, including the occupants of the airplane and one or two more team members. The Eskimo woman goes nuts and apparently kills another team member, though I was a little confused by this time.

The sexy woman, Connie Britton, who has a magnetic face without being the least conventionally beautiful, seems to be the sole survivor. She gives the best performance too. Perlman lapses into the common habit of delivering each use of the F word with emphasis, as if to underline its supposed shock value.

All the way through the film, people have been murmuring about things being out there somewhere. Sometimes they glimpse a strange and inexplicable sight for an instant, too short a time to recognize it.

What it is, is a herd of the most unlikely looking computer-generated ghoulish quadruped monsters you've ever seen or imagined. With that, any suspense or witchery fades into the white out. It might have been a much better movie if the writers and director had followed Val Lewton's example and left the monsters unseen -- or possibly imaginary -- instead of literal.

But then a lot of possibilities are thrown away. This is a bleak and majestic landscape, filmed in Alaska and Iceland, and absolutely nothing is made of its pictorial potential. Imagine what David Lean would have done with such a location.

And maybe this is a personal quirk, but I felt some resentment at the cheap attempt to cash in on a serious ecological problem. The issue is of such importance that it deserves better than this politically correct attempt to make money from it.