FrightFest review – Ithaqua

FrightFest review – Ithaqua

Fort Thomas, ‘remote fur trade outpost’, Canada, 1821.  It’s a rough winter for the few who have stayed at the behest of businessman McKellar (Michael Pitt), with American scout Cole Franklin (Luke Hemsworth) unable to find game to put on empty tables.  Not only has most of the animal life fled the region – or been killed – but the local First Nations tribes are gone or slaughtered thanks to the return of a local curse which has a transformative effect on some victims.  Cole and his sidekick Nicolette (Craig Lauzon) venture forth into the snowy woods to find food, accompanied by haughty, violent British soldier Walker (Kevin Durand) and obviously unwell minion Hendry (Aaron Poole).  They find little food but a lot of ominous, mysterious business – and the maddened Hendry strips naked and becomes a toothy feral zombie-type creature.  Meanwhile back at the fort, Cole’s wife Ahnung (Leena Robinson) and her wise but cranky grandmother Nokomis (Pamela Matthews) recognise that McKellar and a few of his confederates – who take to wearing muzzle-like masks which evoke a 21^st century pandemic – are becoming monsters.

Directed by Casey Walker (producer of In a Violent Nature and The Void, director of A Little Bit Zombie and Home Bodies), who also co-wrote with Pascal Trottier and Peter Scott Vicaire, Ithaqua fits into a subset of horror films which draw on Native American mythology.  The pristine snow, the dark forests, the vampire-werewolf combination monsters, the cannibal stew, the culture clashes, the historical sins and the bone-freezing cold have been seen in the likes of Wendigo, Ravenous (especially) and Ginger Snaps Back, though this tells a fresh story, fitting into the ‘Northern’ strain of Western film.  It seems like simply filling in the backstories to have Walker and Nicolette talk about their hard times in the Napoleonic Wars while Cole is reluctant to talk about his own history, glimpsed in traumatic flashes, as an Indian fighter who has put aside a war he’s disgusted by and now lives with a Native Canadian woman and tries to be part of a different history above the 49^th parallel.  Set against Hemsworth’s Hawkeye type is bespectacled, top-hatted Pitt as a greedy, hypocritical ravager out to extract profit from the land – both, in the end, are monsters, and its their fault that the wendigo (a woodsy kaiju) is summoned here to spread a curse borne by eating human flesh.  There’s a touch of 30 Days of Night in the woes at Fort Thomas when the leather-masked man-eaters invite the uninfected to supper only to tell them that they’re on the menu – providing a mostly measured, slow-building film with moments of action and carnage.

Picked up for release by Hammer Films, this fits into the company’s filmography rather well – it’s the first Hammer horror set in Canada since Never Take Sweets from a Stranger but also forms a bridge between The Abominable Snowman, Vampire Circus and Let Me In.