Wendigo (2002)

Quick, does any of this sound familiar? The camera tracks a car as it glides along a desolate ribbon of highway. A wintry mountain retreat, haunted by Native American spirits, houses a troubled family of three -- a father (Jake Weber) who nurses secret resentments, a mother (Patricia Clarkson) who works overtime to keep the peace, and a tow-haired young son (Erik Per Sullivan, of ''Malcolm in the Middle'') with a hypersensitive, maybe even mystical ability to pick up on undercurrents of disturbance. If you think it all adds up to a bald-faced rip off of ''The Shining,'' you'd be right, with a crucial difference: Wendigo trades the puffed-up metaphysics of middle-class murder for the no-budget spectacle of...an incredibly fake-looking monster deer. If this dud had been made in the '70s, it would have been called ''The Hills Have Antlers'' and played for about three weeks in drive-ins. But the writer-director, Larry Fessenden, has become something of a darling among critics, and that, unlike the movie, is kind of scary.

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