★★★☆☆
Hammer unleashes its first new monster in 60 years, in this blood-soaking wendigo romp in the frozen Canadian dark.
For the first time in sixty years, Hammer conjures a brand-new monster, reaching back to August Derleth’s 1941 Cthulhu-mythos tale for it: Ithaqua the Wind Walker. Casey Walker, a producer on The Void and In A Violent Nature, spent twelve years getting his passion project to the screen, shooting in his and star Kevin Durand’s hometown of Thunder Bay, and the graft shows in the atmosphere.
As the fur trade collapses in 1800s Canada, a mercenary is hired to hold a starving, snowbound outpost together against the cold, the hunger, and a watching evil that curses its victims with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Yes, we’re in wendigo territory, the mythical, cannibalistic creature from the traditional folklore of North America
Ithaqua starts low-key but keeps building until it hits a pitch of snowy wendigo-centred chaos. It’s worth the ticket for the guts and gore alone, plus you have Kevin Durand plainly having a ball with vocal stylings not a million miles from Tom Hardy’s Bane, and game performances from Michael Pitt and Luke Hemsworth. This is a film that walks the fine line between deadly serious and cheerfully hokey, and mostly makes it work.
True, some action set-pieces are geographically muddled, so it’s occasionally unclear who is where once the snow and the screaming kick in. But as a blood-soaking romp in the white-out, and a proper oddity as the Hammer brand’s stab at a fresh legend, it satisfies. One to catch if you want your creatures mean and violent, this is a third strong wendigo movie to sit alongside Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo and Antonia Bird’s superb Ravenous.
Ithaqua played at Tubi FrightFest in London.