Ice Spiders (2007)
Directed by Tibor Takacs
Okay so, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, of course, this movie is bad, its name is ‘Ice Spiders’. Full disclosure, you’re absolutely right. Ice Spiders was never going to be a great movie, it is a Sci-Fi original film about spiders in the ice after all, but that still leaves a big question that does deserve answering. Is Ice Spiders so bad it’s good? That question is a bit more tricky, so let’s get into it and figure out if Ice Spiders has what it takes to hang with the titans of enjoyably bad cinema.
Round Up The Usual Suspects.
Ice Spiders is the timeless tale of spiders and men. We start the story off proper with a group of Olympic skiing hopefuls who arrived at a remote ski lodge to get some uninterrupted practice in and meet a grizzled older (he’s like in his 30s) skier with multiple backstories who can teach these youngsters a thing or two. Along the way, they meet all sorts of quirky characters, like a scientist at a local secret laboratory that everyone knows about, just in time for the ice spider menace to rear its ugly thorax. From then on things are pretty simple, the ice spiders storm the mountainside, trapping everyone in a ski lodge and forcing the local military base to intervene.
The Promising Start To Ice Spiders.
Ice Spiders starts off in the classic monster movie way of a few unsuspecting morons appearing to get killed by the monster and set up the film. A fine start for a movie, except they forgo the typical, “hint at the monster and show a glimpse of it” thing that subtler horror movies do and start off with a beautiful sequence of two hunters goofing off in the woods and seeing an ice spider. An ice spider, that just walks around on the snow waiting to be discovered. And yes, before you ask, the spider is CGI. And no, that CGI is not good. But at least we see the spider the way all movie monsters are meant to be introduced, seeing it full on barely two minutes into the film.
Oh What Could Have Been…
That’s the problem though, not necessarily that we see the spiders early, but that there is a general air of incompetence throughout. Sadly this isn’t in a bizarre off the wall way like all truly great so bad they’re good films are, but in a way that’s just halfway to competence but stops short. Small tangent, but I was watching this film with a friend of mine and the entire time we were watching it, in between making fun of the awful CGI and stupid characters, we were re-writing the film on the fly and suggesting alternate ways that the same sets, actors, and plot concepts could have been used to make a more effective film.
Maybe These Scientists Just Have a Really Messy Lab?
For example, before the spider menace attacks the lodge, we see our scientist heroine go to her lab to do…something, science stuff probably, and she runs into an ice spider in the lab. Problem is, we already know ice spiders are real and kill people, and we already know that they came from this lab, so there’s no mystery. And when this scientist goes to her lab and finds it empty and with a giant spider in it, that’s the first time we see the lab. We don’t have any idea whether or not the lab being seemingly abandoned and full of massive uncovered air ducts is even unusual. For all, I know all the scientists just called out sick that day. Why not instead of having an opening where a spider is revealed for no reason, have an opening, maybe in montage form, where we see the lab busy, full of scientists toiling away on some unknown project and maybe get a glimpse of what they’re working on to tease us. Perhaps then seeing the same lab in an abandoned state would have a bit more impact.
He’s A Grizzled Veteran Skier…And Also A Grizzled Veteran?
And while I’m on the topic of sloppy writing, I have to go back to the ski instructor with multiple backstories. He’s first introduced as a skiing prodigy who had to drop out of the competitive scene after a horrific ski injury ended his career, which is a fine character for this kind of movie that’s filled with many young arrogant skiers that he can clash with. But somewhere along the way it was decided that this wasn’t enough of a backstory for him, because later in the film he mentions that he did “two tours in the Marines” and I cannot figure out how these two backstories are supposed to mesh with each other. The skier probably wouldn’t have been able to pass the physical tests to join the Marines after suffering such horrible leg wounds, but I can’t take seriously the idea of this young man doing two tours in the marines and THEN deciding that he had to go out for Olympic skiing. Isn’t that usually done by people who are young and in their physical prime?
A Sad Finish.
These problems, bad CGI, strange editing, characters with shifting backstroke, seem like they could be funny, but sadly they don’t ever come close to being funny, everything just gets stuck at boring or confusing. You really have to go over the top to make a giant spider movie stand out these days, and Ice Spiders can’t decide whether it wants to be a serious sci-fi horror or a silly spider adventure so it ends up being neither. I’d only recommend watching the first 5 or so minutes for all the laughs you can get out of this film. The rest is just kind of there.
Watch This Instead!
I do want to recommend something though, so now it’s time for a completely different giant spider movie, Big Ass Spider! (AKA “Megaspider” if you aren’t allowed to use or read naughty words) Big Ass Spider is a fun over the top spidery horror comedy about an exterminator who teams up with a security guard to fight a…well you can probably figure it out. Best viewed with some friends and not taken too seriously.
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