Wind Walkers review: “Re-heats old tropes and scares to stitch together a by-the-numbers horror clone.
Wind Walkers review
Director: Russell Friedenberg
Cast: Glen Powell, Zane Holtz, Phil Burke
Running Time: 93 mins
Certificate: 18
Synopsis: With one of their own missing, a group of friends travel to the remote Florida everglades where they discover that an ancient, malevolent curse is tracking them.
Wind Walkers, the latest big screen effort from writer / director Russell Friedenberg, attempts to bring to this years Frightfest a new twist on the classic ‘trapped and picked off one by one’ horror formula, blending in elements of Native American mysticism, zombie-outbreak paranoia, vampire threat and (bear with me), Iraq-war critiquing.
Wind Walkers review
The film charts the return of Lieutenant Sean Kotz as he lands back on American soil after a traumatic tour in Iraq. Haunted and unable to relate to the guys he once called friends, Sean reluctantly agrees to join his former buddies on a hunting trip in to the woods, for a weekend of shootin’, guffawin’, and a whole lot of drinkin’. Problem is, things don’t quite go to plan for Kotz and his rag tag group of friends, as a malevolent supernatural force soon finds them and decides to (wait for it), turn the hunters into the hunted.
A set-up we’ve seen countless times before, the film attempts to re-cloth it with the addition of Native American folklore – curses are muttered, bad times are predicted, and sure enough, the ancient rumours of a vengeful ‘Wind Walker’ spirit prove to be deadly true for our ensemble cast. An interesting premise to begin with, but Friedenberg seems unsure of where to take it, and so settles for staple horror traits – one part zombie infection, one part vampire stalker, the Wind Walker threat veers erratically between the two, ultimately creating an antagonist that feels depressingly familiar, and distinctly unthreatening.
Amidst the bloodshed and paranoia, our human cast struggles to break from stereotypes laid out by the films that came before them – Kotz, portrayed with stony-faced sombreness by Zane Holtz, plays the part of a damanged war veteran beautifully, but the team around him don’t seem to know what to do until it’s their time to be picked off. Confrontations explode out of nowhere, dangerously erratic behaviour goes completely unquestioned, and personality traits change hands more often than a bottle of moonshine. The film seems to be joining the horror dots and killing time until the big third act – we get very quickly that these characters around Kotz are expendable, and the film wastes no time in attempting to build them into anything more than meat to be hurled around the screen.
Wind Walkers review
Whilst the story itself is somewhat ham-fisted and cliched, the film itself is actually beautifully shot – sepia tinged, panoramic shots of the dead looking forest help to give the film a desolate The Hills Have Eyes vibe. Sporadic flashbacks to Kotz’s horrific experiences out in Iraq punctuate the film with stabbing moments of war-time brutality, anchoring the film to a horror that is all too real to people who have served in the armed forces. The film falters when these early, more contemplative scenes give way to shots ripped straight from the action-horror playbook – victims are yanked backwards through windows, blatantly infected-yet-stubborn comrades complain of feeling a bit funny, and our hero poses, guns drawn, for a battle cry in the middle of a clearing that screams ‘poor-man’s Predator‘.
Ultimately, this is where the film fails. An interesting set-up that rushes towards a cliched climax gives little room for the threat to develop, blowing the tension built up in those initial scenes by whacking the film into fifth gear and putting the foot to the floor to reach it’s blood-drenched conclusion. Wind Walkers is by no means an awful film, rather a wasted opportunity to do justice to a premise that could have introduced us to a new breed of nightmare creature, but instead re-heats old tropes and scares to stitch together a by-the-numbers horror clone.
Wind Walkers review Nick Martin, August 2015.
Wind Walkers will be showing at this years Frightfest on Friday 28th August, 2015
