IMDb RATING
5.0/10
1.3K
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Three friends on a New Year's Eve snowmobiling excursion find themselves stranded at an abandoned lodge where the elderly female innkeeper is concealing a sinister secret.Three friends on a New Year's Eve snowmobiling excursion find themselves stranded at an abandoned lodge where the elderly female innkeeper is concealing a sinister secret.Three friends on a New Year's Eve snowmobiling excursion find themselves stranded at an abandoned lodge where the elderly female innkeeper is concealing a sinister secret.
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Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaAccording to director Jim Makichuk the film's money started to run out when the movie was only half shot, so rather than cancel the production altogether he decided to abandon the remaining script and make things up as he went along, hoping to at least retain the film's creepy atmosphere. He said this explains the released film's rather uneven, incoherent second half and sparse use of the plot's monster.
- GoofsThe trio of hikers wonders why it's so warm inside the hotel, yet you can clearly see their breath in every shot.
- Alternate versionsAn alternate introduction was filmed two years after the movie's completion by its distributors. The scene shows a young man running through the woods away from the hotel, who is then stabbed with a wooden stake against a tree. This alternate introduction appeared on some home video releases in Europe and Canada. The alternate introduction is not featured on the 1986 U.S. VHS release of "GHOSTKEEPER" from 'New World Video'.
- ConnectionsFeatured in 31 Days of Horror: Wes Craven Presents The Hills Have Ice (2019)
Featured review
A wintry chill
Atmospherics go a long way, if not quite far enough, in this Canadian tax-shelter film that apparently ran out of money mid-production, so they basically had to improvise the remainder of a shootable script without funding. Which does explain how there's more of a premise than a real plot here, with things never quite kicking into high gear in terms of either narrative or action--though there's enough creepiness and death for this to unquestionably qualify as a horror film of sorts.
The three snowmobilers staying at a resort--two obnoxious enough that you can guess they won't likely live to see the final fadeout--go off-trail during heavy snow, ending up at a seemingly abandoned old hunting lodge. But it's not quite abandoned. There's a weird older lady creeping about, and then it turns out some others, more elusive as well as murderous.
The remote winter setting gives the movie a nice visual flavor, and an eerie score is a big help in maintaining some suspense in a progress that otherwise might seem close to rudderless. Despite the sparse writing, the film is well-paced enough to hold interest. But it's more an example of resourceful people making something of very little under difficult circumstances, than it is of those people creating something of real substance. You do have to wonder just how different the movie would have been if the funding hadn't fallen through--was there a more ambitious (or at least better-developed) story in the original script? Maybe we'll never know.
The three snowmobilers staying at a resort--two obnoxious enough that you can guess they won't likely live to see the final fadeout--go off-trail during heavy snow, ending up at a seemingly abandoned old hunting lodge. But it's not quite abandoned. There's a weird older lady creeping about, and then it turns out some others, more elusive as well as murderous.
The remote winter setting gives the movie a nice visual flavor, and an eerie score is a big help in maintaining some suspense in a progress that otherwise might seem close to rudderless. Despite the sparse writing, the film is well-paced enough to hold interest. But it's more an example of resourceful people making something of very little under difficult circumstances, than it is of those people creating something of real substance. You do have to wonder just how different the movie would have been if the funding hadn't fallen through--was there a more ambitious (or at least better-developed) story in the original script? Maybe we'll never know.
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- ofumalow
- Dec 31, 2023
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Details
Box office
- Budget
- CA$750,000 (estimated)
- Runtime1 hour 29 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1
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