a review of

2021 Cult Movie Challenge Week 2: Joe Estevez Week Movie #1 I wasn't expecting much from this one going in, and to be honest I feel like I got slightly less than that by the end. There's certain aspects of the makeup and digital effects that are surprisingly effective (with KNB cofounder Robert Kurtzman's other company doing some of the creature work apparently) but there's also a lot of clearly cut corners in the practical elements that make this seem more amateurish than anything. There's a scene in the first few minutes where a character offers Dan Haggerty a piece of meat torn from a large animal carcass that has supposedly been roasting over an open fire for several hours. The carcass appears to be a large papier-mache model with clearly visible snow on top, there is no visible fire in the shot, and Haggerty literally pantomimes eating an invisible piece of meat. The first two are basically forgivable, but did they really not have any kind of food on the set that they could have used? It takes a good half of the movie before we really get into any of the Paul Bunyan mythology, which gets an extremely hasty expository rundown by Joe Estevez's character before we're back to more Sharknado-level running and chasing and such, and then the movie is basically over. There's a couple of scenes that feel like something made in an earlier decade, just in terms of the optics of having black characters getting "accidentally" shot by shotgun-toting rednecks or of depicting people who are clearly part of some Upper Midwest right-wing militia as heroic saviors. Ultimately, the movie suffers from not being quite funny enough to qualify as a horror comedy, but also not being quite serious or scary enough to really qualify as a more normal sort of horror movie. I can tell that the filmmakers really wanted to make something that engaged with this particular mythology, but there just wasn't enough here to justify the effort.