John’s Horror Corner: Blood Glacier (2013), and what Al Gore wanted you to think would happen as a result of global warming…and the inconvenient truth of mutant monster animals!!!

MY CALL: This fun, monster-driven B-horror movie follows The Thing‘splaybook. It’s entertaining, but I’m not going to suggest you break down doors to see it. MOVIES LIKE Blood Glacier: The Thing (2011). ALTERNATE TITLES: This Austrian film was released by the name Blutgletscher. This was also title The Station. TRAILER:  CLICK HERE to see the TRAILER.

Finally, a film with a message! This film addresses the important questions, like “What will happen to us if the polar ice caps melt?” The answer: we’ll all be starring in a mash-up of National Geographic and The Thing (2011)! I figure this is the inconvenient truth that Al Gore wanted you all to think would happen as a result of global warming if you don’t start investing in more solar panels.

This film opens with blatant over-exposition “explaining away” why each character is important in a color-by-numbers format. Our story takes place at a climate research station in the Alps housing four people and a dog.  Did you just cringe, thinking about the dog kennel scene in the original The Thing? Yeah…me, too.

During some sort of “weather patrol” with the dog (wink, wink) they stumble across a “blood glacier.” They briefly lose track of the dog and everyone somehow gets conveniently cut or bruised. From here, the auspiciously scored “infection sequence” is so obvious there may as well be smoke signals. But it’s not just the researchers we have to worry about. The blood from the thawing glacier infects the local wildlife with some hybridizing single-celled organism that mutates them into hideous monsters. HOORAY!

The effects are not exactly high-tech, but they get the job done and the clumsily-puppeted rubber creatures put a big grin on my face. There’s a beetle-fox mutant (think The Nest), a giant killer roly-poly (think The Bay), giant mosquitoes, evil mountain goats, insectoid birds of prey…see the grin forming yet?

There’s nothing in this movie you haven’t seen before many times over. The scene with examining and explaining the virus/parasite/mutagenic thing, the infected dog scene, watching the clock as infected people become a liability, pulsating parasitic infections housing brooding monsters… I mean, there’s basically even a facehugger scene. Speaking of facehuggers, in the opening scenes the strong female scientist character feels almost as if they were trying to make her reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

Yup…been there, done that.

Is it just me, or does this guy smack of the The Thing’s MacReady? Or Joel Edgerton’s “not Macready” character from the “not remake” prequel?

Yup…narrow eyes and beards across the board.

SO, WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER? Well, there is the bummer that this was not in English. This isn’t necessarily a “flaw”, but I don’t speak German. I saw it dubbed in English, so I wasn’t distracted from the effects by “reading” the movie or anything. But the dubbing quality was akin to a less-popular Anime and the characters’ mood and enthusiasm rarely seems to match the scene. You also get little appreciative sense of the acting and you can basically hear in the tone of the voice actors that they simply don’t get paid enough to care. I felt this especially detracted from the humor of the opening scene, in which the debilitatingly hungover technician Janek (Gerhard Liebmann) is called to fix a glitch in his underwear.

Director Marvin Kren (ABCs of Death 2, Rammbock: Berlin Undead) successfully delivers a trope-rich, predictable, fun monster movie that should please horror fans and gorehounds. I’d save this for the fanatical, though. Folks who watch “a scary movie” once a month will likely consider this terrible.

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