Canada, the 1800s. American mercenary Cole Franklin is recruited as a hired gun at the remote outpost of Fort William, struggling to survive the decline of the fur trade. With dwindling supplies, the keepers of the Fort blackmail Cole into leading a trading party to a nearby Indigenous village, where they discover a massacre and encounter the remaining half-crazed inhabitants eager for blood. Though the trading party survives with minimal losses and returns to the Fort with a bonanza of food and furs, the supernatural force responsible for the carnage follows them back.
Grimmfest says: Hammer makes a welcome return to Horror with this intelligent, literate, and very bloody slice of Western Gothic. A gripping and grisly tale of guilt and redemption, atrocity and atonement, it exposes the savagery that lurks just beneath the surface of Colonialism’s spurious notions of “civilisation”, and how quickly that savagery is exposed out in the wilderness, where even the wind has teeth. And where the threats, the monsters, however real they be, are also metaphors for the evils we unleash upon ourselves. Grounded by a strong sense of place, time, and sociopolitical background; combining history with fantasy, genuine First Nation folklore with the feverish imaginings of August Derleth, and some uncomfortable echoes of gruesome real-life events with a smartly selected sprinkling of old school Horror and Western genre tropes, the film is nevertheless, at heart, a classic Hawksian Men On A Mission narrative, with its deftly-drawn character arc of developing mutual professional respect between the two initially hostile main protagonists, played with depth, weight and commendable complexity by Hemsworth and Durand. And because we care so much about the characters, the horrors they are faced with are all the more visceral and immediate, their fates all the more traumatising. In short, Hammer are right back in the saddle where they belong.