Ice Crawlers (2003)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2015
SYNOPSIS: Ice
Crawlers would be a great name for a frozen drink that creeps
down your throat slowly, then explodes up your nervous system with a jolt.
Or maybe a lime-green slushy with gummy worms inside.
As a drink? Exemplary. As a movie? .......yeah.
A bunch of graduate students and a young hotshot oil driller are being flown to Antarctica as part of some vaguely-defined research mission project thing. The graduate students are excited. The weather is bad. The oil driller doesn't have a lot of book-learning, but he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. The pilot is confident. The professor chaperoning the group seems nervous about something.
They disembark, and almost immediately things start to go wrong. People start to disappear. The grizzled crew doesn't trust the college kids. And worst of all -- every time the young hotshot oil driller (Curtis) comes on screen, a twangy guitar lick plays on the soundtrack. Every. Single. Damn. Time.
Turns out there is a tangled plot afoot for the prof to take a mysterious specimen off-base while remotely setting off an explosion in the "moon pool," which will be blamed on the hotshot young oil driller and the batch of grad students.
And it might have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling ... trilobites. That's right -- the Ice Crawlers are giant trilobites which have been coming up through the moon pool and eating people. At first we thought they were psychic because of this odd flash-frame-flashback thing that happened when they ate somebody -- but no, it was just artistic wankery. Not psychic trilobites, just very large ones.
Carnivorous giant trilobites versus annoying oil driller with super- annoying soundtrack leitmotif. Well, let's be honest -- with the sole exception of the grad student computer geek, every character was highly annoying. I was rooting for a meteor strike, or perhaps a stupendous explosion. By about the twenty-minute mark. There were promising hints at the end the movie ... hints that implied a Godzilla-sized trilobite. But by this time, it was far too late. I only wanted the movie to end, 80 minutes of my life back, and something Very Bad Indeed to happen to everyone involved.
As a drink? Exemplary. As a movie? .......yeah.
A bunch of graduate students and a young hotshot oil driller are being flown to Antarctica as part of some vaguely-defined research mission project thing. The graduate students are excited. The weather is bad. The oil driller doesn't have a lot of book-learning, but he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. The pilot is confident. The professor chaperoning the group seems nervous about something.
They disembark, and almost immediately things start to go wrong. People start to disappear. The grizzled crew doesn't trust the college kids. And worst of all -- every time the young hotshot oil driller (Curtis) comes on screen, a twangy guitar lick plays on the soundtrack. Every. Single. Damn. Time.
Turns out there is a tangled plot afoot for the prof to take a mysterious specimen off-base while remotely setting off an explosion in the "moon pool," which will be blamed on the hotshot young oil driller and the batch of grad students.
And it might have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling ... trilobites. That's right -- the Ice Crawlers are giant trilobites which have been coming up through the moon pool and eating people. At first we thought they were psychic because of this odd flash-frame-flashback thing that happened when they ate somebody -- but no, it was just artistic wankery. Not psychic trilobites, just very large ones.
Carnivorous giant trilobites versus annoying oil driller with super- annoying soundtrack leitmotif. Well, let's be honest -- with the sole exception of the grad student computer geek, every character was highly annoying. I was rooting for a meteor strike, or perhaps a stupendous explosion. By about the twenty-minute mark. There were promising hints at the end the movie ... hints that implied a Godzilla-sized trilobite. But by this time, it was far too late. I only wanted the movie to end, 80 minutes of my life back, and something Very Bad Indeed to happen to everyone involved.
Kevin Hogan
John Carl Buechler
