Rating: C-
Dir: Nick Szostakiwskyj
Star: Shane Twerdun, Michael Dickson, Carl Toftfelt, Marc Anthony Williams
There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from genre classics which have gone before. However, the closer you cling to them, the more you invite direct comparison. When you are tight as writer-director Szostakiwskyj, you need to have bring your “A” game, and this does so only in the set-up department. The severe lack of payoff is likely to leave most viewers disappointed, particularly if they have seen the inspiration. And I can’t imagine many people choosing to watch wintry, isolation-based scientific horror will not already be highly familiar with The Thing. Should you not be: boy, are you in for a treat. Here, however? This is, “We have The Thing at home.”
It unfolds on an archaeological dig in the Canadian wilderness led by Miles Jensen (Twerdun), as winter starts closing its icy grip. Professor Piers Olsen (Dickson, looking rather Kurt Russell-y) has just arrived, to investigate an unusual discovery. Artifacts have been found, pre-dating the accepted timeline, as well as a buried structure of uncertain size. Weird occurrences start almost immediately: the native workers bail out in the middle of the night, and several of the remaining crew members start to behave increasingly erratically, showing violent tendencies – both toward each other and themselves. Naturally, communications with the outside world are cut off, and the staff have to figure out what is going on. Cabin fever? An outbreak caused by deep-frozen pathogens? Or something more Lovecraftian, an elder god having been released from its slumber?
It’s fine when generating a sense of unease, with some genuinely creepy moments. For example, the scene where one character is trying to hold a conversation, while the voice in his head (Williams) is urging, “Kill him!” Or when the camp’s doctor reveals, “I ran some tests on the tumors that were forming under his skin. The cells aren’t human… They bear similarity to the cells of a cephalopod.” WTF? There’s enough potential here to power an entire franchise of eldritch body-horror. Unfortunately, the film never particularly delivers, beyond a couple of moments of fairly energetic limb-lopping. To stand alongside its highly obvious inspiration, it needs to have a payoff capable of making the viewer say, “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding.” There is not.
Nowhere is this more true than at the ending, where the end credits show up so unexpectedly, I had to check I hadn’t dozed off, and missed an actual climax. I had not. A conversation with the voice, a scream off-screen, and that’s it. If this had been the pilot episode for a TV mini-series, it would have worked well, setting this up nicely for exploration over the next 4-6 episodes. As a standalone film, I found it less than adequate. Not from any technical shortcomings, and the performances are fine too. It’s very definitely a scripting issue: Szostakiwskyj seems to have taken too much inspiration from ol’ Howard P, and forgotten that approaches on the written page and screen sometimes need to be different.