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.)

EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN
(Review)

“Man, stop worrying. Your 20’s suck. Worst period of your life. You’re lonely, feel like your head’s being blowtorched from the inside. And you don’t even know what it is because we were never even, like, taught the words to describe it. So you feel like an idiot and a loser, and because everybody else is so young and beautiful, you think they’re having a great time. But the fact of the matter is, dude, they’re just as lonely and scared and f*cked up as you are.”

Douglas Coupland is perhaps best known as the author of novels like Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture, Girlfriend In A Coma, Microserfs, and Microserfs’ spiritual sequel, jPod, but with Everything’s Gone Green, Coupland has, at long last, told a story specifically for the big screen.
Ryan (Paulo Costanzo, from TV’s Joey and the upcoming Splinter) is having a bad day, dumped and fired and thinking his family was this close to 4.3 Gs, all in the span of a few short hours.
But all that dreadfulness is about to change into a sprinkling of opportunities, thanks to a new job and a beached whale.

Director Paul Fox (The Dark Hours) does a bang-up job of giving us what is essentially an audio-visual Coupland novel. It’s all here, from the ruminations on modern life, to the quirky characters constantly finding themselves in off-the-wall situations, all the while making observations about where we are and what we’ve done to ourselves as a species.
Embodying those aforementioned quirky characters is a laid-back cast headed by Costanzo, and supported by War’s Steph Song (also appearing in the TV adaptation of Coupland’s jPod), JR Bourne (from Thir13en Ghosts and The Exorcism of Emily Rose), and Aidan Devine (who appeared in Fox’s The Dark Hours, as well as David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence).
But with all these capable performances on screen, it’s interesting to note that one of the most engaging characters in Everything’s Gone Green, is the city of Vancouver.

Vancouver, BC has long been the shooting destination of choice for American productions that want to keep their budgets on a leash; five of The X-Files’ 9 seasons were shot there, as were both Fantastic Four movies and the two latter X-Men films, while current Hollywood North television productions include Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Reaper, Supernatural, and Bionic Woman. (Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen is also currently filming there; see Afterthoughts (27).)
Serving as both setting and stand-in for the story’s characters and modern life as we know it, Vancouver is constantly something other than what it actually is. It dazzles and preoccupies with its surface glamour, while so much that is left unseen and unnoticed, goes on beneath the surface.

And while this theme is seen in all the other characters in Everything’s Gone Green, it is perhaps most evident in Ming (played by Song), who works as a set dresser, her job, to continually make Vancouver look like some other place.
At a certain point in the film, she moves in with her knife-wielding, Mandarin-speaking Granny (Chiu-Lin Tam, playing the film’s cutest and coolest character), cluttering up the place with random props—fake cacti, fake limbs, fake breasts—from her work.
It isn’t an accident that just as she’s decided to turn a new leaf, to “move forward” instead of back, she moves all of the props, all the inauthentic detritus that clutters her life, into the basement.

Like Coupland’s novels, there’s a lot going on in Everything’s Gone Green, but it isn’t blared out in obvious, overly melodramatic ways. At its core, the film is a funny look at life and what we make of it, and the oftentimes slippery slope that lies between being true to ourselves and going for the quick buck.
Set in Vancouver, a city of magical artifice readily set-dressed to be any other city in some distant corner of the world (sometimes, even galaxy), Everything’s Gone Green is about trying to get through, and get by, pushing to move forward, without cutting corners. It’s about discovering what truly makes you happy, no matter what that is.
And ultimately, it’s a small film that manages to be both beautiful and hopeful, which should make Ming very happy indeed.

“God, does anybody do anything real these days?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone’s in on a scam, or creating something that nobody really needs just to sell it to people who are too stupid to care or notice. Whatever happened to just being real? Why aren’t we content to just be middle class?”

Parting shot: Everything’s Gone Green won the award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

(Everything’s Gone Green OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art [Unrated Version] courtesy of amazon.com; images courtesy of everythingsgonegreen.com.)