CHRIS COLFER STARS IN YOUR NEW FAVORITE CAMP HORROR JAM.
Boyd Grayson is an Irish playboy who delights in bringing men home to his sprawling family estate for sex, just to spite his legacy-obsessed mother, reminding her she’ll never get the grandchildren she craves. When an accident leaves him incapacitated, Boyd finds himself handless, helpless, and at the mercy of her care.
Luckily for Boyd, his mother’s familial wealth has given him the opportunity to be the first person in the history of the world to pilot an experimental technology: mechanical hands controlled entirely by his subconscious. Soon, however, the hands begin to move on their own… even when they’re not attached to Boyd’s body.
Chris Colfer playing Irish, Alice Krige playing a matriarch trying to rebuild her son at any cost. Add to the mix disembodied hands that come to life, a crumbling estate full of barbed arguments, and a gallery of characters as despicable as they are magnetic. Colfer and Krige are delicious as cinema’s most twisted mother-son duo you can’t help but adore, and Declan Reynolds as Lee will become the new horror heartthrob of your gay dreams.
Director Glenn McQuaid embraces the melodrama with a sharp eye and fearless sincerity, grounding the film’s outrageous premise in real emotion.
While always funny, the film feels authentic and sincere, expressing pain around queer acceptance and the need for familial bonds even when those relationships can be painful. THE RESTORATION AT GRAYSON MANOR is fun, it’s sexy, it has some astounding grounded camerawork, and we’ll all learn the importance of a satisfying helping hand. (AUSTIN KING)
JUST DESSERTS is Tom Laverack (guitar and vocals) and Larry Fessenden (vocals and sax) backed by Mark Ambrosino on drums, Dave Richards on bass, and Dave Morgan on keyboards. Larry and Tom have played music since 1979 and have released 5 albums, most recently “Curtains” (2025) and the JD Sampler “Not What You Want But What You Deserve” (2026). They played the New York clubs back in the day, including CBGBs, Pyramid Club and Knitting Factory. Laverack’s music has been featured in all of Fessenden’s movies including his latest, Trauma Or, Monsters All, unspooling at the Woodstock Film Festival this year.
MAKE A NIGHT OF IT
Trauma plays at Tinker Street Theater in Woodstock at 9:30 same night
Glass Eye Pix wants to help you count down the days to HALLOWEEN! What better way than with our Shocktober Nights Advent Calendar. Behind each of the 31 die-cut passages lurks a ghoulish delight brought to you by artist BRAHM REVEL.
Warning: As it turns out, this product may be unsuitable for children!
For reasons beyond the realm of human understanding we needed to shoot more footage for Fessenden’s feature, and so this week we shot in a studio in NYC and on Wednesday 23 September the Last shot of TRAUMA was orchestrated virtually between New York and Los Angeles. Thanks to all involved. That’s a wrap. If you’ve seen TRAUMA, you aint seen nothing yet.
By Robert Scucci | Posted on Climate Week Sept 18 2026
I’m just going to come out swinging and say that I’m not really a fan of cautionary environmental tales that spend more time preaching than entertaining. At this point, most informed people understand that we’re causing irreversible damage to our planet, and most uninformed people are so set in their ways they’re not going to improve them.
While I’m known to joke excessively about throwing my used car batteries into the ocean where they belong, I don’t actually do that, but I can’t resist my parents’ uncomfortable laughs whenever I visit and say things like that in casual conversation. And while I had my reservations about checking out 2006’s The Last Winter for the above reasons, the 76 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and the presence of Ron Perlman were enough to get me to buy in.
I’m glad I tuned into The Last Winter because, while the environmental messaging is pretty boilerplate and overdone, there’s almost a cosmic level of horror lurking just beneath the surface. My main recurring thought was that this movie really reminded me of The Thing, while entirely carving out its own identity.
The remote, snowy wilderness, isolation, paranoia, and fading sense of an already strained team at the end of their rope, in my mind, make this a perfect spiritual successor to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Watching both films back to back would make for a great double feature that will leave you absolutely wrecked by the time you finish, if I had to weigh in.
Starts In A Bad Place, And Gets So Much Worse
The Last Winter takes place at a remote Alaskan drilling station, where the K.I.K. Corporation is preparing to explore the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil. Running the operation is Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), who clashes with environmental scientist James Hoffman (James LeGros) over whether the unusually warm conditions have made the project too dangerous to continue. Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) is caught somewhere in the middle, having previously worked with and been an item with Hoffman before becoming romantically involved with Pollack, because being trapped at the end of the world apparently wasn’t uncomfortable enough for the already worn-out team.
Things get considerably worse when rookie worker Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford) wanders off into the snow and returns claiming that he saw something out there after his equipment suspiciously reports that he wandered over 300 miles through the unforgiving outside conditions.
He later grabs a video camera and heads outside alone in the middle of the night to document a herd of spectral caribou, because that’s the smartest thing a man could do in this situation, but it’s reasonable to believe that his decisions are being influenced for the worse by some sort of unknown, cosmic force beyond the scope of human comprehension. Maxwell turns up dead the following morning, complete with eyes gouged out, prompting Hoffman to suspect that gases released from the thawing permafrost could be causing hallucinations and erratic behavior among the crew.
With communication becoming unreliable and the weather refusing to cooperate for climate change reasons, getting everybody out of the station becomes increasingly difficult. Hoffman and Pollack are already at each other’s throats over what’s actually happening, and the mounting body count doesn’t exactly improve morale. Whether they’re dealing with toxic gas, collective insanity, or some ancient, incomprehensible force that really doesn’t appreciate having its backyard drilled for oil becomes the larger question as their isolated little operation completely falls apart.
Everybody Acts Reliably Like They Should Here
Ron Perlman is the true MVP in The Last Winter because he sells Pollack’s hardened demeanor with so much grit that you know it comes from a place where he has to think and act the way he does. He wants to stick to protocol no matter how dangerous things get, and though he never explicitly explains why he’s such an immovable object, it’s clear that he simply wants to do things by the book, no matter how increasingly misguided that kind of logic becomes as it works against him and his crew while matters continue to escalate.
At the station, everybody drinks like the world is ending, and in this case, I don’t think anybody should stop them. It’s cold, miserable, people are dying left and right, and there’s no way out. Sure, taking large, oblivion-seeking swigs from a flask is probably the worst thing you could do to ward off hypothermia, but if you’re going to die anyway, you might as well synthesize the feeling of warmth with whatever means you have at your disposal.
The Last Winter is absolutely brutal, and everybody sells how dire the situation is without overacting or exaggerating the gravity of it. The only failing, if you could call it that for a film that came out in 2006, is that the CGI, when used to show the source of the terror, is lacking. However, it’s the only thing that breaks the immersion, and it’s not like this is what dominates the cinematography. Just squint, and you’ll be right back to where you need to be.
If you’re a fan of the nameless dread that boils just under the surface of John Carpenter’s The Thing, you’ll feel right at home streaming The Last Winter, which is currently available to watch for free on Tubi as of this writing.
The New York City bound run and gun shoot is produced by Gaby Leyner (BLACKOUT, TRAUMA) and Fessenden and is made in partnership with Maggio’s Incidental Films. The feature was shot by Wild Man Damien Drake.
Maggio’s previous Glass Eye collaborations include the thriller BITTER FEAST, numerous TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE (and of course various un-produced scripts)
Glass Eye pals are coming to Nitehawk! Premiering at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Fest this October:
Part of the HOME INVASION 1 Block THE CRYING MAN; directed by Emily Bennett, starring Fessenden and Toby Poser.
VIEWFINDER; directed by GEP Pal Clay von Carlowitz, starring Emily Bennett and Nick Fondulis.
WALTER WUZ HERE; directed by GEP Alumn Ben Duff; featuring GEP’s Rigo Garay.
And be sure to catch THE GLORIOUS DEAD; directed by Glass Eye pals John Adams and Toby Poser. And the NYC premiere of Fessenden’s TRAUMA OR, MONSTERS ALL.
Variety has the scoop on the full lineup: Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2026 Unveils Lineup Premieres Include Parisian Vampires, Body Horror and More Wild Genre Tales
Glass Eye Pix is the fierce independent NYC-based production outfit headed by award-winning art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts. Read more...
