Boyd has a secret that becomes more of a problem once a disheveled and malnourished frozen soldier, Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) stumbles into their camp. He says his wagon train got lost and their guide, Colonel Ives, soon forced them into cannibalism to survive, with last victims being Colqhoun and a civilian woman. Seeing that he himself was soon going to die, Colqhoun escaped and struggled to survive until he arrived here. Hart, realizing the woman might still be alive, bands everyone together except Knox, who has been drunken and unconscious, to rescue her in a cave Colqhoun leads them to.
Boyd tries to convince others that Colqhoun has taken his cannibalism to extremes, equating him to the native American myth of the Weendigo, a creature, sometimes human, that through cannibalism extracts the strength of others, but needing to feed more and more.
A very interesting premise with a pretty good cast gets wasted as the film is more intent on being a standard horror film instead of really using the Weendigo legend or its long-ago setting to create an atmosphere different from other films. Some actors were cast to type (Davies, Arquette, Jones), others overplayed their characters into loud stereotypes (Spencer, Spinella). Carlyle was good but his character was badly written, like a typical horror villain he was pretty unstoppable but managed to be stopped at the last minute. Pearce’s character was pretty normal and the character had the most range, but he too was relegated to just a long battle with the villain in the end. The Indian woman is shown paradoxically both as a wise Indian or a hysterical woman.
The music was very interesting, by Michael Nyman and a guy I don’t know, Damon Albarn. Sometimes the music wasn’t a good fit for what was taking place on screen, but there were some interesting eerie sounds I haven’t heard before.
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