Product Details

• Actors: Allen Lee Haff, Götz Otto, Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld, Karen Nieci, Howard Holcomb
• Directors: John Carl Buechler
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Concorde
• VHS Release Date: July 22, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000092T49
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,118 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Bad, But Nothing You Haven't Seen Before, February 21, 2004

By 

Gary Young (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice Crawlers (DVD)

Pretty typical creature movie. Some prehistoric creatures are unearthed by a drilling company in Antarctica. They begin to eat the cast one by one until they are finally destroyed by the last survivors(...or are they?).
You've seen it all before, occasionally with better results. Yet this film does have a good overall look as well as some appealing characters. The creature f/x are passable, though not the greatest.
If you're a fan of the whole creature amok genre, "Ice Crawlers" is worth a look.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tentacled Trilobite From Below The Ice, January 20, 2004

By 

Joshua Koppel (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ice Crawlers (DVD)

A team of grad students arrive at an Antarctic oil drilling facility. But they have arrived in the middle of hidden chaos.

Drilling may be affecting the ice shelf (hence the students arrival) but the company has made a discovery that could redirect attention away from environmental issues.

Earth (or is it ice) quakes now plage the facility and the title beasties begin to eliminate the human population.

This is really silly. The facility is huge. Way too huge for the region where all building material is shipped in. No attention is paid to power or heat (I liked the thirty-foot ceilings). There is also the scene where the chopper pilot has managed, single-handedly, to move the chopper into a low ceilinged warehouse (supposedly a Quonset hut). Scenes like this abound. Half the people disappear from the contained facility before anyone begins to suspect anything.

The ending is typical of many beastie movies and needs to be seen to be believed. A fun movie for a group to pick apart (MST3K awaits).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "This Laptop Has All My Data. To Access It Use The Password 'Bugmama.'", December 2, 2010

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ice Crawlers (DVD)

"Ice Crawlers" is B-movie drivel about evil oil companies, giant prehistoric bugs, and collegiate romance in the Antarctic. Just reading the credits I expected it to be a winner: Directed by Belleville, Illinois' very own John Carl Buechler (who has an interesting special effects lineage including work with Roger Corman,) and co-writer Matthew Jason Walsh, a very talented guy who traces his work back to the weird and wonderful early J. R. Bookwalter pictures. Unfortunately, it seemed here that despite the talent it was somewhat phoned in. As a fan of the big rubber monster genre films, I did admire the lack of CGI in the film, and that feature plus the interesting commentary (more interesting than the film by far) earned this movie a two star rating.

The film opens with a bunch of grad students from Blasko Institute riding to the Antarctic in a helicopter: there's lots of shallow banter that explains who the characters are. In the research station are some strange characters and scientists including a hottie scientist with a giant apartment complete with a hot tub. Right. This is the most isolated continent on the planet and buildings are extremely small and austere. Not here though. Geotech owns the entire gigantic complex (which would easily be the biggest building in Antarctica,) so it seems strange that a central plotpoint is that it is just "a giant cost-cutting machine" run by evil capitalists. If they are so budget conscious why the huge complex? Perhaps that's too much detail to consider when appraising this film, so returning to the plot we see the hottie attacked by tentacles from under her bed, while in other developments, nauseating collegiate romance rears its ugly head and the ground starts experiencing numerous powerful tremors.

It seems that Geotech has drilled through the Antarctic ice shelf and they are the one causing the earthquakes. It's so alarming the UN is getting involved (like that's going to fix something.) What with all the plotting going on it's hard for the others to notice when people start dying at the tentacles of the unseen monster. Finally a body is discovered by Professor Jacobson (David Millbern) and some teens, and a grad student is appointed to perform the autopsy. Really. Of course one of the youngsters is an environmental activist, and it becomes a wretched excuse of an anti-oil movie for a while (they are going to use explosives to get the oil, etc.) As a counterpoint, there's also a teenage oil drilling expert who is a polar opposite of the environmentalist, so it's a given they must form a deep bond and become teammates. Along the way we get to see several gruesome killings, including one involving an unusual chewing tobacco angle, and one of the roughnecks, Munson (Norman Cole,) who has the most frighteningly hairy torso I have ever seen, meets his maker in the shower. There's even an obligatory sex scene with trilobite interruption!

When we find out that the killers are giant trilobites with tentacles, it turns out they apparently have some kind of mind control, as the victims generally have flashbacks from various parts of the movie when they die. The young eco-warriors discover that the monster is a DNA match with a trilobite from 10,000,000 years ago. They go on to explain that it's a cross between a worm and a mosquito (?) that looks like a big cockroach. Jacobson, who is fortunately a trilobite specialist, has questionable loyalties and is confronted by the crazy German played effectively by Goetz Otto during a rampage in which he also destroys all the station communications: it's a tired plot device, but filmmakers still embrace it.

There is way more drama in the last half hour of the movie than in the rest of the film, as they find out the can't leave because the helicopter pilot was eaten by a trilobite, then a trilobite puppet causes an electrical failure, introducing the issue that after the twelve hour battery dies they will all freeze. The kids find the trilobite specimen that Geotech knew about all along in the lab, and somehow they connect Geotech's drilling for oil with their complicity in destroying the ozone layer. (Huh?) The trilobites, who despite being bugs from 10,000,000 years ago, are so brilliant that they always wait until a victim is alone before attacking, continue to thin out the cast. I particularly like when the cast members in a frenzy of overacting have to hold the rubber trilobites against themselves during the vicious attacks, much like Lugosi had to hold the octopus on himself in Ed Wood's "Bride of the Monster," only this is much less scary. After a hilarious reveal of the queen trilobite, the German contingency decides to blow up the facility (surprise!) leaving only the obvious pair of environmentalist girl and oil well boy to potentially survive, although the conclusion is unclear on this point: do they make it out? We all have our own personal desires on that one.

The film is very plodding, especially in the first hour. None of the characters are particularly likeable except perhaps for Curtis (Allen Lee Haff,) the teenage oil drilling expert. The acting is generally deplorable. Otto gives an over-the-top but effective and useful performance as the German driven mad by the tundra, while the worst performance is from David Millbern. Tunde Babalola as Shockley performed adequately, and Haff was also decent in his role. The film had a lot of pretentious elements that detracted from the rubber monster genre that Buechler obviously loves (big oil, ozone layer depletion, etc.) As a finished product the film was a disappointment. Having said that, the commentary is excellent, and I really enjoyed listening to Buechler discuss his background and his intentions and directorial decisions for the film. He obviously was under severe budgetary restrictions, and with that in mind I suppose he did what he could with what he had; it just came across as ponderous and heavy-handed. I really appreciated Buechler's grasp on the rubber monster ethos, and he seems to be a very affable guy with a genuine love for films and filmmaking. Although I can't recommend "Ice Crawlers" on its own merits, I do expect to see more Buechler films in the future, as he is a talented guy with obvious affection for the genre.