Director: Paul Kener
Writer: Paul Kener based on a short story by Algernon Blackwood
Release Year: 1978

Hickory roasting.

A whole bunch of dreadful campers are led by faux-French-Canadian Defago (Van Washburn Jr.) out into a wilderness that includes an island haunted by some evil spirit which is guarding a treasure or some such stupidity….

Spoilers follow, but really, who cares….

So. I have no idea where to begin on this one. Well, the plot seems to be based on … killing hateful people in the mountains. The acting is … not good. The special effects are … neither. The mythology is … confused. So, I must admit, am I.

Okay, the myth of the wendigo is that it’s an embodied spirit of useless gluttonous cannibalism. The wendigo is a creature that’s always hungry for human flesh and is never satisfied – kind of like a nymphomaniac with an oral fixation. In this film, the wendigo is a spirit that oven roasts its victims to a savory charcoal; we’re talking Cajun ‘blackened cast’. The spirit seems to be mean or is guarding something or is just offended by the really bad acting and the use of the ancient Indian burial ground cliche.

The director arrives on set.

The characters are horrible people who I couldn’t wait until they died. The acting ranges from a grade-school Christmas pageant to your uncle’s impression of Carl Sagan which everyone smiles at politely – unwittingly encouraging him in the process. While none of the actors do justice to their roles, one of the women at least shows us the top of her butt when she goes skinny-dipping in the icy water for reasons that she doesn’t share. She does find one of the men watching her and gets scared, but, judging from the coldness of that water, she could easily put his eyes out with her nipples, probably from ten feet away.

Me Tarzan, you Jane.

Speaking of horrible acting, Van Washburn Jr. has to be singled out as especially egregious. His accent would be out of place in an episode of G. I. Joe, it’s worse than Keanu Reeves‘ in Dracula, it’s worse than Zsa Zsa Gabor‘s accent in … anything. This accent is so bad that it’s basically a hate crime against French-Canadians. It provided a lot of the entertainment value that I found in this movie.

Eem Fraunce Canadian ... ribbit, ribbit.

The special effects are mostly scarecrows being set alight. That is all.

When herpes is left untreated.

You know what? Instead of reading this or trying to find the movie, read the original text of the story at the wonderful Project Gutenberg.

Rating:

Click to see crappy Wendigo poster»