(Spoilers galore) This is an absolutely awful film. First of all it has that guy from medium. I guess he's made a career out of playing super doting dads. It was OK the first time he tried to scare his son by pretending to be a monster...but then 10 minutes later they cloyingly did it again! And so it goes, this film moves in excruciating real time. At one point, I started imaging it was days later, until I was reminded that the story line was only at the next day...in the early afternoon still! I'm not really sure who this couple is supposed to be in real life. First of all they are presented as sort of a Manhattan yuppie couple who grew up and had a kid. But they drive an old blue Volvo. Those types stopped driving Volvos decades ago. Today they drive Priuses. But in 2002, I'm sure they still weren't driving Volvos.
OK, then there's Wendigo. A "mysterious Indian man" gives the boy a little magic Wendigo statue and tells him of its powerful magic. C'mon...are we still doing ancient Indian mysteries. Just to drive it home, they pan across every Indian statue in their tourist trap upstate New York town. American Indians are portrayed in a manner not seen for decades in this film! Oh, and about Wendigo. He is not actually the cause of the horror. He doesn't kill the kid's dad which is the most horrible thing in the film...he's just killed by an ordinary hick with a grudge and a high powered rifle. The Wendigo only comes out late in the film to avenge the guy who killed the dad...oh, but wait, it seemed earlier that Wendigo was kind of mad at the dad, maybe because he killed a deer...so then Wendigo must have been happy that the dad was killed...but...
And so it goes...insulting, boring and nonsensical. There is no reason to watch this film at all.