THE THAW
(Review)

“The melting Arctic will reveal a frightening truth.”

In the ecological horror film The Thaw, director Mark A. Lewis presents us with a prehistoric parasitic terror that could prove to be the end of all there is. (Or, at the very least, put a very serious dent in civilization as we know it.)
The apocalypse cinema conceit is established right off the bat with the news montage-as-opening credits sequence gambit done in such entries as Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead redux, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and Logan McMillan’s Last of the Living.
The gambit worked in those films, as it does here.
Of course, the reality is, as early as its opening credits sequence, The Thaw is already recalling earlier horror films, and it continues to do so, as the reels unwind…


Set on Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, the film brings to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing, the first season X-Files episode, “Ice” (which was, itself, a sort-of, kind-of Thing retread), Carter Smith’s adaptation of The Ruins, and the brilliant eco-horror entry, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter.
Which is, frankly, rather august company, if not for the fact that The Thaw suffers in comparison.
Having said that though, I must stress that The Thaw is still worth your time. I mean, when you’ve got X-Files alumnus William B. Davis in the aforementioned opening credits, talking about global warming and Armageddon and how it’s all our damned fault, well, that’s something that you need to pay attention to.


I have to say though, that aside from the semi-familiarity of the material, the cast isn’t exactly across-the-board good either.
There’s Val Kilmer in there (as ex-eco-activist David Kruipen) and Smallville’s Aaron Ashmore (whose twin Shawn happens to have been in The Ruins) and Everything’s Gone Green’s Steph Song, who’s saddled with a rather thankless role here.
There’s also Martha MacIsaac (as Kruipen’s mightily pissed-off daughter, Evelyn) and Kyle Schmid (from TV’s Blood Ties).
I shall refrain from pointing out which of the above are the weak links in the film’s cast… (Though I will say that MacIsaac did a great job in Dennis Iliadis’ remake of The Last House on the Left.)


Still, with all its flaws, The Thaw does have a bunch of cringe- and shudder-inducing moments, and, like The Last Winter, can serve as an effective cautionary tale of how we, as a race inclined to apathy, and perpetually unsatisfied with our lot, may very well end up destroying ourselves.
If you’ve been avoiding Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth thus far because “documentary” is still a dirty word to you, then perhaps The Thaw is the answer.
I mean, if a teeny Ice Age parasite can help wake up the masses, I’m sure Al Gore wouldn’t mind…


Parting shot: Reviews of The Last Winter, The Ruins, The Last House on the Left, and Everything’s Gone Green can be found in the Archive.

(The Thaw DVD cover art and images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

BLOOD TIES

Pilot
“Blood Price”

(Review)

Dude in Black, about to become a Demon Victim, talking to his Goth Girlfriend on his cellphone: “There’s some guy. He’s wearing a black cape or something. Cool. He looks like the freakin’ Prince of Darkness.”

Based on the series of Victoria Nelson novels by Tanya Huff, Blood Ties kicks off with ex-cop turned P.I. Vicki Nelson (Christina Cox) witnessing the murder of the aforementioned Dude in Black (Juan Riedinger). His Goth Girlfriend, Coreen (Gina Holden, Final Destination 3 and TV’s Reunion), subsequently uses some choice lines (“They’re real. Out there. Walking the night. Looking to slake their unquenchable thirst. Feeding on us the way we feed on cows or chickens.”) and hires Vicki to track down her boyfriend’s murderer, since she’s convinced said murderer is a vampire, and wouldn’t you know it, cops aren’t equipped to handle vampires, much less believe in them.
And as the tabloids go on a frenzy over the string of “vampire” murders, it turns out that there really is a vampire in town, one Henry Fitzroy (Kyle Schmid, The Covenant), a vampire of the sensitive, pretty boy variety, who is both Henry VIII’s illegitimate son and a comic book—ooops, excuse me—graphic novel artist. Henry is incensed at the negative press his kind are getting from the tabloids, and decides to get to the bottom of the murders as well, causing his path to cross with Vicki’s.
Sparks fly, chemistry kicks in, Henry is forced to feed on Vicki after being severely wounded, yada yada. You can see where this is going, right?
Oh, and I forgot to mention, there’s also some residual sexual tension between Vicki and Mike Celucci (Dylan Neal, Pacey’s older brother on Dawson’s Creek), her ex-partner/lover, who happens to get assigned to the murder case as well.

Now, despite my smart a$$ tone above, the set-up isn’t that atrocious. Mind you, it’s close, but what truly sends it plunging over the edge and deep into the Cheesy Abyss is the manner in which the material is approached.
To start with, the lines…
Like this one, from a Morbidly Cheerful Coroner: “Like from teeth. But whatever did the cutting was razor sharp. It cut right through skin, muscle and cartilage in one fell swoop. No animal can do that.”
“In one fell swoop”?! Does anyone actually say that in reality?

There is an awkward air to the show, something about the approach that doesn’t quite gel. Sometimes, it seems that all involved are fully aware that their tongues are lodged firmly in their cheeks, but they never seem to completely commit themselves to that position, leaving the show in a lurch, and squarely in the territory staked out by mongrels like Charmed, territory that just makes me cringe and wince and want to head for the hills. (Or take out contracts on the show’s “creative” team.)
Blood Ties reeks of those ersatz genre works that have been cobbled together by normal people looking in, people who are trying to tell stories of outsiders, but don’t really get how it is to be on the fringes. Thus, it has the overriding feeling of being a perception—a flawed one at that—as opposed to an actuality.

A case in point is the horrible negative stereotype of the psychotically unhinged loser geek (Norman Bridewell, played by Michael Eklund, easily taking Worst Performance of the pilot), whose obsession with getting a chick is what starts all the trouble in the first place, as he works his way towards calling up Astaroth, portrayed here as a bald, white-bug-eyed dude in a robe with a funnily modulated voice.
The requisite Professor of the Occult doesn’t help the cause of the geeks either with lines like, “Every year there’s a few that play one too many games of Dungeons and Dragons and then they start looking into places they have no business.”
Yes, parsing the statement tells me it isn’t meant to denigrate D&D, but for anyone who isn’t really listening, it sure sounds like D&D caused him to call up the bald, white-bug-eyed dude in the robe with the funnily modulated voice. Gasp! D&D must be bad, then!

And as Norman brings the world towards the brink of Armageddon in the name of his woody, he does his best to transform into Cool Goth but only succeeds in reaching Pathetic Wannabe. It might have been funny, if this wasn’t the sort of show that tries to stage a scene in some generic Cool Goth club, but only succeeds in giving us a Pathetic Wannabe.
I mean, this guy gives geeks and Goths a bad name, in… wait for it… one fell swoop! (This show is lucky the graphic novel artist is the vampiric romantic lead, or they would have really cut down on their potential audience.)
There is no attempt whatsoever to show the audience why Norman is so screwed up, he just is. I’d like to think that if he was about to be the cause of the end of the world as we know it, that we’d learn a little bit more about him other than that he draws and plays Everquest.

Written by Peter Mohan (producer on Mutant X) and directed by Allan Kroeker, this one is a klunker, the sort of show that climaxes with a magical showdown involving an open grimoire, a lot of gesticulating, and some dodgy special effects. I’m honestly not sure which one is worse, this, or The Dresden Files pilot.
If either one is better than the other, it’s only by the slightest of margins. I’m talking nanometers, skin-of-your-teeth close.
It’s especially distressing to me since Kroeker not only directed an episode of Wonderfalls (“Crime Dog”), but also the pivotal Battlestar Galactica episodes “Bastille Day” (which introduced Tom Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, the “original Apollo”) and “Resistance” (which introduced Sam Anders, the future Mr. Starbuck).
I mean, come on, Kroeker! BSG to Blood Ties?! Yeesh!

And granted, the fact that Henry is actually the Duke of Richmond and Somerset—who died of consumption just 3 days after his 17th birthday—opens up the narrative to a lot of potential (not the least of which is the fact that if he ever gets it on with Vicki, she’d be guilty of statutory rape). But if they continue to approach the material in this clueless and artless manner, they’ll just be pissing away a good opportunity to tell a hell of a story.

(Image courtesy of tv.com.)