Dead on arrival.

Another bad movie warning: Don't dare bother with 'Dead of Winter' (2007)... not even if you are stuck choosing between it and say, the Prom Night remake. At the very least, Prom Night has Kellan Lutz in it.

First of all, the reason I rented this gem from Netflix is because I read somewhere that it was a cross between 30 Days of Night (which I really liked) and The Shining (obviously a classic and a fave of mine)...
Well, quoting lines verbatim from The Shining does not a good movie make.... and as for the correlation between this dreck and 30 Days of Night? That I don't get at all. Ok, there was snow in both films, I'll give them that. But no vampires, and certainly NO scares whatsoever.

The threadbare plot consists of this: Tiffany and Kevin are in their early twenties, about to move in together, and headed to a New Year's Eve party. At the party, one of Kevin's friends slips some LSD in their drinks and then tries to make it with Tiffany. (great friend, eh?)
Tiff and Kev angrily leave. They soon start tripping on the drugs and have a car accident because Kevin thinks he sees someone in the backseat of the car. (If only - at least that would have been somewhat alarming...) They leave the car and start running through the woods.

The End.

No, seriously - this movie really was as bad as it sounds. It is supposed to be scary I suppose, but to be honest, I was frightened more by Willy Wonka and his psychedelic boat trip down the freaky chocolate river and through that nausea-inducing tunnel to hell ("There's no earthy way of knowing....which direction we are going....")
All these two do is trip out, run through the snowy woods, and find abandoned buildings and shacks to scare the shit out of themselves in.

The acting is poor, to say the least. The cinematography is crap. There is no gore to speak of- and absolutely not one scary moment. I've been more shocked watching an episode of American Idol than this rubbish. They actually tried to startle the viewer with a malicious snow tram/plow (another rip off from The Shining?)... and then attempted to pull off a seriously malfunctioned twist ending that you could see coming a mile away.
Even funnier is the fact that at the beginning of the movie, it says this was based on true events. I find that incredibly hard to believe.

If you're looking for movies with drug induced stupors causing weird shit to happen, rent 'Shrooms' - though not an instant classic, it's much more effective - and the acting doesn't suck.

Dead of Winter = really really bad.