Winterskin (2018)
Another good one from Dark Temple / Charlie Steeds. It’s basically two people snowed in a log cabin and under siege from horrific, skinless creatures. Or so it starts out. Being a Steeds script nothing is what it seems at first sight.
One of the main assests of these Dark Temple films is their recurring rep company of interesting actors. Barrington De La Roche inevitably turns up, but as a secondary character. The show stealer here though is Rowena Bentley who makes a fine ‘Momma Agnes’, a somewhat eccentric old lady who turns out to be even “more cuckoo than a Swiss clock factory” and twice as lethal.
Steeds ratchets up the tension via long, edgy dialogues between Agnes and Billy, (a man she rescued from the blizzard after accidentally wounding him with a shotgun, meaning he can’t escape when Agnes starts creeping him out), punctuated by short sharp explosions of violence – the comparisons to Stephen King’s “Misery” are inevitable.
The finale consists of a nicely choreographed slo mo firefight inside the shack. The cabin interior set (built in Guildford, apparently) looks like the real McCoy and some location filming in Norway provides plenty of authentic snowy forest footage. Great for Yuletide viewing