Comedic horror film features Rochester native Robert Forster's poignant final performance

Brian Truitt

If “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” being a werewolf flick isn’t enough to sell you on the comedic horror thriller, it also contains Robert Forster's poignant last performance.

Forster, the Oscar-nominated actor and Rochester native who died last October of brain cancer at age 78, plays aging Sheriff Hadley, a lawman with a bad ticker who, alongside his cop son John (writer/director Jim Cummings), a struggling alcoholic and dad, has to deal with young women getting ripped apart by a mysterious beast in their Utah ski town. USA TODAY has an exclusive clip of Forster’s first scene in the movie (available on demand, including Amazon Prime), where Sheriff Hadley — in addition to riffing on Willie Nelson and getting too many emails — reflects on his own mortality and tells of a 1979 bank robbery where the culprit changed his mind and realized he shouldn’t be making stupid decisions when the police got his daughter on the phone.

Robert Forster:Oscar-nominated 'Jackie Brown' actor dies at 78

Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster, center) rallies the troops, including fellow officers Julia (Riki Lindhome) and his son John (Jim Cummings), to hunt down a mysterious, murderous beast in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow."

“It's like this weird, cautionary tale,” Cummings tells USA TODAY, and “Robert got it immediately. He was like, 'This is a metaphor for the entire movie. OK, cool.’ He did such a good job. I love that scene so much.”

“Wolf” filmed in March 2019 and "he was one of us. He was like this crazy young actor in the body of Robert Forster,” says Cummings, who regularly chatted with his co-star about life, legacy and fatherhood.

“He was like, ‘Yeah, I'm never going to quit working. I know that's a weird thing for my family. They wished that I could retire, but being an actor is who you are. It's not a job: You don't clean up your desk and leave.’ That was incredibly inspirational to me.”

Calling Forster a “gentleman cowboy,” Cummings says his death “was just such a real shock to all of us," wishes he was still around and considers it "incredibly bittersweet" having Forster's final role in his film. “It was like this two-way street of you're feeling (lousy) because you lost a buddy and then kind of OK with it. The movie is this documented moment about how wonderful he was.”

Forster enrolled in the University of Rochester intending to become a lawyer. He literally stumbled into acting when he followed a fellow female student he was trying to talk to into an auditorium where "Bye Bye Birdie" auditions were being held. He would be cast in that show, that fellow student, June Provenzano would become his wife with whom he had three daughters, and it would start him on a new trajectory as an actor. (Forster and Provenzano later divorced.)

After graduating from UR in 1964, Forster moved to New York City, and a role in the 1965 Broadway production "Mrs. Dally Has a Lover" put him on the radar of Darryl Zanuck, who signed him to a studio contract. He would soon make his film debut in the 1967 John Huston film "Reflections in a Golden Eye," which starred Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

Forster would go on to star in Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" and the detective television series "Banyon." It was an early high point that he would later describe as the beginning of a "27-year slump."

He worked consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s, mostly on forgettable B-movies.

His performance as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" (1997) put him back on the map, earning him his first and only Oscar nomination.

After "Jackie Brown," Forster worked consistently and at a higher level than during the "slump," appearing in such films as David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" (2001) and ''The Descendants" (2011) opposite George Clooney, and on television shows like "Breaking Bad" and the "Twin Peaks" revival. 

Includes reporting by the Democrat and Chronicle and the Associated Press.