Family of trappers living in the wilderness, Dad and daughter are into it, Mom’s maybe getting tired of it, when a wolf starts raiding their trap line, and to say any more would spoil it. Rack up one more above-average flick for the Canadians. What starts off seeming like “wilderness family gets threatened by natural or unnatural monster” veers off into becoming a seriously dark backwoods noir that only very slowly builds to where it’s going. It’s far from perfect—sags in the middle a bit, and feels a little like something was left on the cutting room floor somehow—but, draws on Canada’s apparently abundant pool of oddly engaging unknown actors, and manages to develop into something fairly original. Could be a low-key cult classic. By the very end, it tilts full-on into gore, but only at the very end, and by being somewhat demure up until that point—such as only showing one particularly horrific murder scene, which comprised a key plot point and had been very slowly built to by simply keeping a character absent, by only showing the reaction of the person discovering it—they manage to do what gore flicks have been failing to do for close to 50 years: make it effective and shocking. And before that, it’s clearly noir a la Tarantino, not gore or horror, and done reasonably well at that. Ultimately the fact that it’s really only an exploitation film, designed to build up to that grisly final minute or two, is betrayed by the fact that, the bad guy dispensed with as gorily as possible, the movie simply ends, rather than continuing on to at least wrap up the story in a narratively satisfying way and show the aftermath. But, still, I feel like this is the movie Wes Craven thought he was making with “Last House On The Left”, and many other gore directors, on up through Eli Roth, thought they were making ever since, except this one actually pulls it off and succeeds as a movie. I think it deserves a place in the canon. Near the bottom of the canon, but, it gets in, for sure. I do think at this point someone should have a festival of all these backwoods noir movies, seems like there’s been a few of them by now, sometimes pretty decent.
