<i>Blood Glacier</i> Definitely Not a Perfect Imitation of <i>The Thing</i>

A few months ago, some friends told me about a movie on Netflix called Blood Glacier. They said, “so there’s this Arctic research station…” and I cut them off. “Shut up, just shut up,” I said, my voice wavering. “You had me at ‘Arctic research station.’” Then they said the magic words: “It’s supposed to be like The Thing.”

That got my attention. I love The Thing. It’s in my top 3 favoritest movies ever, horror or not. “Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “Don’t get my hopes up.” I must have said this more aggressively than I intended, because they back-tracked, saying, “well I don’t know, that’s just what I heard.” That’s like saying, “man, Calipari’s squad this year is supposed to be better than 2012.” The casual fan won’t notice, but the serious fan doesn’t want that crap batted around like a half-dead balloon. After I calmed down, I attempted to watch it with no expectations. I fire up the ‘flix and let ‘er rip.

Bad news right off the bat. Over still shots with a blood-red filter, the on-screen exposition explains that global warming is forcing nature to adapt, and as it does, so will we. No matter where you stand on a particular issue, there’s little I like less in a movie than a message delivered to me with a heavy hand (Crash, Elysium). Even a message with which I agree, and especially when it has pretty much nothing to do with the movie.

Ok, so it takes place at a research station in the Austrian Alps, not the Arctic. Everyone speaks German instead of English and Norwegian, which is understandable in Austria. We are quickly introduced to Janek, the drunk and sour handyman who nurses an eternal hangover and hates everyone but his dog. (If you’ve seen The Thing, you know not to get attached to the dog.) This is obviously Blood Glacier’s R.J. MacReady, The Thing’s drunk and sour pilot. Both are no-nonsense, take-charge dudes who aren’t afraid to assert their authority in sticky situations by being on the right side of a gun. Damn, maybe Janek is American.

Also Thing-like, a chance encounter with a thawed organism that likes to use other animals as hosts gets the action rolling. Our researchers encounter cross-species hybrids, like a fox-beetle that rummages through trash, and a roly-poly beetle-fox -woodlouse that eats faces. In an almost unbelievable feat of deduction, the resident biologist figures out from a few peeks through the microscope that the microbes in the weird red glacial runoff are combining the genomes of fauna found in the affected animals’ guts, then gestating a bunch of ugly, aggressive Wuzzles in those animals. (These miscreants are supposed to be cautionary examples of the adaptive chimeras that result from changing environments, but it’s not really obvious what evolutionary advantages come along with being a fox you can step on.)

A cascade of stupid decisions and rotten luck later, we have researchers carelessly handling unknown specimens, which of course later comes back to bite them in the ass and/or face; destruction of said beasts with fire; a scientist burnt to a crisp just outside the research station; a dwindling group of trapped, stressed acquaintances that begins to turn on each other; and a host of other The Thing similarities. Not saying that Blood Glacier consciously tried to imitate The Thing–I mean, there’s only so many things can happen at a remote cold-weather research station–but fans of the latter will see a whole lot of it in the former.

Blood Glacier doesn’t completely lack originality. As far as I know, it’s the only horror movie featuring a glacier. Most of the creatures are kind of disturbing, with the jacked-up ibex stealing the show in my opinion. It simply tries too hard in places–character development and exposition, too much for a low-budget horror–and not hard enough in others. You don’t need the damn romantic subplot between Janek and his ex-girlfriend. You do, however, need to see a lot more of the cobbled-together creatures snacking their way through a hapless crew of humans. And not that a horror movie can’t have a little humor, but it shouldn’t shift from uniformly dreary to slapsticky Dead Snow-type bloodletting, with a government minister almost gleefully drilling through a monster’s head while getting showered with gore.

If you’ve heard that Blood Glacier is a worthy successor to John Carpenter’s The Thing, don’t believe it. I really wanted to like this flick, but it simply doesn’t have enough to merit getting excited about. Halfway through, I found myself wishing that the movie was actually about a murderous glacier, cuz how fun would that be? A town that wakes up every morning to find citizens ground into a bloody paste, with nothing but a trail of water leading back up until the Alps…but alas, Blood Glacier was far less interesting. Watch it in October if you can’t find anything else on.