Alex McArthur is Tom Kempton, an animator who works in Hollywood. Tom, along with two friends, goes on an ice fishing expedition but when Tom loses his backpack and has to head back and find it, he crashes his snowmobile and has to knock on the door of a nearby cabin to ask for help.

Two strange women let him in and give him some brandy to keep him warm while they wait for 'Pinky' to get back, as he'll be able to help Tom with his snowmobile. The sisters drug him though, and when he wakes up, he finds himself duct taped into a wheel chair and missing his pants. I hate when that happens. At any rate, it turns out that these two sisters are cannibals and that they're going to eat him. Just as they're about to drill into his skull, his two friends show up, guns blazing, and save the day. But when making their escape, it turns out that one of the sisters may not be dead at all.

Tom makes it back to Hollywood safe and sound and decides he's going to turn his experiences into an animated feature film. His obsession grows, as he becomes more and more infatuated with the sister who may or may not be dead until the cops notify him that they've found her body. He investigates things further and finds out that she had a child who she put up for adoption years ago. He tracks her down and it turns out she's an aspiring actress.

He strikes up a relationship with her and they become friends. Through getting to know her he realizes that she has no idea who her real mother is or that she was a serial killing cannibal, but all that changes when Tom finds out that her son may have inherited some of his grandmother's lesser qualities. It seems he's got a penchant for killing animals and cutting out the genitals of some of the local girls.

Tom gets drawn in deeper and deeper until finally it all hits the fan and he's got to figure out how to get out of this web without any more people winding up dead. He's also got a pregnant wife to consider through all of this, and of course, still needs to get his semi-autobiographical cartoon completed as well.

The films starts of as a Misery inspired thriller but after the first twenty minutes plunges head first into a poorly constructed character drama, lacking any real scares or tension (with the notable exception of one really good jump scare towards the end of the film). Characters are introduced and then simply discarded (an incarcerated brother really serves no purpose other than to provide and less than convincing red herring), plot lines are left undeveloped (a glaringly obvious murder/suicide at the end of the film brings no repercussions down on those involved at all) and the entire movie feels very half-assed.

Long time David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti supplies the score for the film but those expecting to hear his trademark musical weirdness will be sorely disappointed by this generic sounding score which almost sounds like it was phoned in. The weakest link in all of this though is McArthur as Tom. He spends most of the film speaking in a hushed tone that would be better suited for a soap opera star than the male lead in what is supposed to be a thriller.

Video:

The widescreen, non-anamorphic 1.78.1 transfer is good but not great. Colors are fine and flesh tones look nice and natural but the darker colors pixelate in a few scenes and there is quite a bit of compression noticeable throughout the film. Edge enhancement is minor, but there though it's not too distracting. The compression is mildly distracting though as instead of seeing solid blacks, we get dancing pixels moving up and down across the image.