The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) **

 

Writer/director Jim Cummings made a splash in 2016 with the short film, “Thunder Road,” which, with some help from Kickstarter, he expanded into a feature film 2 years later. The feature cost about $200,000 to make and earned about $400,000. In the Indy Film world, that's enough of a success to get you another chance at making a project, usually with a bigger budget. Bigger, however, does not always mean better.

In “The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” Cummings (who also wrote and directed) plays John, a Utah Sheriff's deputy. When his small, mountain town is rocked by a series of grisly murders, John must deal with a panicked populace, an ex-wife, the health problems of his dad, who is the Sheriff (Robert Forster), his own alcoholism, and a killer who might just be a werewolf.

Cummings wrote, directed, and starred in this film, and I would say that he does a poor job with all 3 roles. The script is a hot mess, bouncing around in tone from serious family drama to various attempts at horror-comedy and back again. If anything, I usually complain about movies being too long. I would normally be praising this film's 85 minute run-time, but this is one where taking a little more time to build the horror and develop the characters might have helped things. As it is, the movie lurches from scenes that are unnecessarily long to plot developments that come out of nowhere.

As an actor, Cummings attempts to deal with these tone problems by just yelling and acting really angry a lot. The rest of the cast actually try to make a go of it. Riki Lindhome is pretty good as one of the other cops, and I would say that the movie owes what success it has to her, as well as to Robert Forster, who classes up anything he appears in. The cinematography also deserves mention, with some beautiful shots of snow-covered mountains. There could have been a decent movie here, with a better filmmaker at the helm. As it is, “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” doesn't make any sense, and it isn't funny enough to work as an Evil-Dead-style horror comedy.

2 stars out of 5