Ice Spiders (2007)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2013
SYNOPSIS: What goes down stairs alone or in pairs? Why, genetically altered spiders being bred in a top secret government facility located on Mt. SkiResortNextDoor! Never fear, it's totally impossible for the 6 spiders to get out of their cages ... at least according to Dr. McSlimy-pants. He heads the research facility and we hate him because he's slimy. And pantsy. But mostly he's your typical Evil Mad Scientist type and you totally know he's dinked with the spider mutant formula. He's an evil scientist, that's what they do.
Meanwhile, a whole ski team of unlikable overprivileged teens is being hauled up to this ski resort up in the middle of nowhere at the end of ski season so they will stop fooling around on the internets and start getting their heads into the ski zone. One of the Unlikable Teens (UTs) has a shot at the Olympics if he'd only quit texting and start shushing and by golly, the coach isn't going to let him waste away his talents. Needless to say, nobody is happy on the UT bus.
Meanwhile, a couple of hunters are out hunting and what should they spy? Ooooo! A giant mutant ice spider the size of an overstuffed lounge chair! For some reason, the giant spider looks like a much cooler trophy than the elk nearby, so they try to tag them an Arachnozilla. This does not go well, so they start in on plan B: Run like hell. The good news is that the hunters manage to escape from the one Giant Ice Spider; the bad news is that there are five other Giant Ice Spiders, and one of them finds the hunters. Incidentally, the CGI spiders don't suck enough to get on the Stupid Looking Monster list even with the stupid annoying spider-vision.
Back at the top secret lab, the not-slimy-pants spider scientist is having suspicions about the spider project. Initially, the project was to grow bigger web weavers so they could get more silk to study (because spider silk is awesome stuff! Oh! In a moment of science cool they explain that each of the 6 spiders has a dominant gene from one particular spider family – none of them peaceful orb weavers I noted – so each of the 6 Giant Ice Spiders looks different and hunts slightly differently. Nice touch). However, suspicious spider scientist thinks maybe lazy-boy-sized is well beyond the original scope of the experiment. She's had some samples fed-exed out to a friend of hers for analysis and the spider character sheets come back with bad news. Someone's dinked with the mutant formula. Also, by the time she gets back to the lab, the spiders have eaten all her comrades and escaped. Their accelerated growth makes them very hungry, very vicious, and their metabolism isn't slowing down at all in the cold like the scientists originally thought it would. Drat, there goes our Worst Science nom.
The spiders eventually find the ski resort (which is way fuller than an end-of-the-season resort ought to be), and.... Uh-oh, you got your spider experiment in my ski lodge. Well, you got your ski lodge in my spider experiment. That's ... an equation for chaos and spider terror.
We got some nice Alases, as we thought we might, given Giant! Ice! Spiders!, but not a lot of Acting Appropriately Stupids, like we were anticipating. Most everyone in this movie did the intelligent thing when push came to shove, which totally blew our clipping budget for AAS. The lost hunters' search-and-rescue team initially splits up, but stays in radio contact with each other, then when weird things start surfacing, they rejoin and buddy up. Even the military guys are smart and take precautions when hunting the spiders. No one's acting stupid! That's totally not fair. Hrumph. Ah well, we at least got some good clips, although not enough of the UTs were eaten for our tastes.
Meanwhile, a whole ski team of unlikable overprivileged teens is being hauled up to this ski resort up in the middle of nowhere at the end of ski season so they will stop fooling around on the internets and start getting their heads into the ski zone. One of the Unlikable Teens (UTs) has a shot at the Olympics if he'd only quit texting and start shushing and by golly, the coach isn't going to let him waste away his talents. Needless to say, nobody is happy on the UT bus.
Meanwhile, a couple of hunters are out hunting and what should they spy? Ooooo! A giant mutant ice spider the size of an overstuffed lounge chair! For some reason, the giant spider looks like a much cooler trophy than the elk nearby, so they try to tag them an Arachnozilla. This does not go well, so they start in on plan B: Run like hell. The good news is that the hunters manage to escape from the one Giant Ice Spider; the bad news is that there are five other Giant Ice Spiders, and one of them finds the hunters. Incidentally, the CGI spiders don't suck enough to get on the Stupid Looking Monster list even with the stupid annoying spider-vision.
Back at the top secret lab, the not-slimy-pants spider scientist is having suspicions about the spider project. Initially, the project was to grow bigger web weavers so they could get more silk to study (because spider silk is awesome stuff! Oh! In a moment of science cool they explain that each of the 6 spiders has a dominant gene from one particular spider family – none of them peaceful orb weavers I noted – so each of the 6 Giant Ice Spiders looks different and hunts slightly differently. Nice touch). However, suspicious spider scientist thinks maybe lazy-boy-sized is well beyond the original scope of the experiment. She's had some samples fed-exed out to a friend of hers for analysis and the spider character sheets come back with bad news. Someone's dinked with the mutant formula. Also, by the time she gets back to the lab, the spiders have eaten all her comrades and escaped. Their accelerated growth makes them very hungry, very vicious, and their metabolism isn't slowing down at all in the cold like the scientists originally thought it would. Drat, there goes our Worst Science nom.
The spiders eventually find the ski resort (which is way fuller than an end-of-the-season resort ought to be), and.... Uh-oh, you got your spider experiment in my ski lodge. Well, you got your ski lodge in my spider experiment. That's ... an equation for chaos and spider terror.
We got some nice Alases, as we thought we might, given Giant! Ice! Spiders!, but not a lot of Acting Appropriately Stupids, like we were anticipating. Most everyone in this movie did the intelligent thing when push came to shove, which totally blew our clipping budget for AAS. The lost hunters' search-and-rescue team initially splits up, but stays in radio contact with each other, then when weird things start surfacing, they rejoin and buddy up. Even the military guys are smart and take precautions when hunting the spiders. No one's acting stupid! That's totally not fair. Hrumph. Ah well, we at least got some good clips, although not enough of the UTs were eaten for our tastes.
Jeannette Quirk
Tibor Takács
David Millbern
