Customer Reviews

Ice Crawlers [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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).

"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.

The director of "Ice Crawlers," John Carl Buechler, should be instantly recognizable to fans of low budget films. He's lensed a few other slightly recognizable films, including "The Curse of the Forty-Niner," "Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood," "Watchers Reborn," and "Troll." O.k., so they aren't classics, but lovers of cinematic sludge will recognize a few of these titles. His real claim to fame is special effects, and his body of work in this area is even more noteworthy. He worked on providing the gluey effects found in "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers," "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare," "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4," Robert Englund's "Phantom of the Opera," "Bride of Re-Animator," "From Beyond," "Trancers," and dozens of other B-movie extravaganzas. His body of work is truly astonishing. Looking at the list, I'm reminded of a few reviews I wrote slamming several of these films. Well, I'm about to do so again with "Ice Crawlers." Why? Because Buechler and company took on a monumental task, namely making a low budget film that attempts to replicate the success of John Carpenter's "The Thing" by completely ripping it off. If you're going to do a knock-off of a horror film, it's probably best to pick one that isn't a cult favorite.

Seriously, I sort of liked "Ice Crawlers" in spite of itself. Set in Antarctica (I told you so), Buechler's film chronicles the adventures of an oil company called Geotech and a batch of baby faced new employees. A series of scary earthquakes during deep ice drilling seems to have alarmed the company suits, so they send in a bunch of young hotshots to figure out what is going on and correct the problem. I won't bore you with all of these kids' names--mainly because I don't remember most of them despite having took notes while watching the film--except to mention Arianna (Karen Nieci) and Curtis (Allen Lee Haff). These two are, of course, the heroes of the story who will stand and fight when the horror shows itself. The rest of the new employees, including a token minority computer expert, are cannon fodder. Anyway, these kids arrive via helicopter into a base loaded with paranoia, potential violence, and conspiracies. The grunts doing the drilling, the most memorable of whom is a crazy German dude named Nelson (Goetz Otto), don't take kindly to strangers telling them what to do. There is also a gorgeous research scientist, Monica Kelsey (Alexandra Kemp), in charge of...well...something important. Oh, and the presence of an evil scientist named Ted Jacobson (David Millbern) virtually requires that some sort of monster arrive on the scene.

It takes awhile to figure out all the specifics, time enough for Dr. Kemp and a few others to bite the bullet, but we eventually learn what's going on in Geotech's Antarctic research facility. It turns out that all this deep drilling brought to the surface a never before seen species of trilobite, horrible looking beasties roughly the size of manhole covers. What a find! Unfortunately, trilobites don't really like human beings if "Ice Crawlers" is any indication. In fact, they find our presence in their arctic digs downright offensive, and they soon take appropriate measures to drive the two-legged bipeds out. It's nothing for these creatures to pull a full-grown man into a large vat of water, or hide underneath a bed so they can drag someone across the floor with their large, bristly tentacles. These monstrously huge trilobites can even burrow into a human being's body. Needless to say, the pulling, dragging, and burrowing throw our trapped little characters into a big tizzy. As the body count rises, it is up to Arianna and Curtis to save the day. It won't be easy, not in the least, especially considering what resides in the drill hole down on the lowest level of the facility. Where are Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley when you need them?

"Ice Crawlers" does contain a few fun elements. A male viewer will quickly learn to lament the rapid passing of Alexandra Kemp's character. Without her the film seems to lose some of its...er...proportion. The extraordinarily, stupendously, magnificently cheap special effects used to create the trilobites evoke howls of derision rather than groans of terror. These are some really cheesy looking monsters, folks. Whenever a trilobite moved across the floor, I kept waiting for the camera to pull back and reveal a stagehand dragging it along with a piece of string. What's worse, even an idiot can tell that the denouement involves the use of miniatures in a small tub of water. Yet it's all sort of fun in an eye rollingly bad way. I ought to mention here that the scariest part of the film doesn't involve the trilobites or the terrified reactions to them. Rather, it's the worker who takes his shirt off for a shower to reveal the hairiest torso ever captured on film. How about bringing a lawnmower on set to take of that problem, eh? I figured he would live because the trilobites would be too scared to touch him.

The DVD version of "Ice Crawlers" is interesting due to the presence of a lengthy interview with John Carl Buechler. He talks about his early life, how he became interested in doing special effects, how he obtained work in Hollywood, his tenure with Roger Corman, and his interest in directing films. It's nice to finally see what he looks like since everyone knows that the real stars of a horror movie are the guys doing the gory effects behind the scenes. Other supplements include a commentary track and trailers for "Firefight," "Demon Slayer," and "Barbarian." Buechler's film can't compare to "The Thing," but it's not entirely a lost cause either. "Ice Crawlers" is an adequate if derivative way to pass a couple of hours.

Since there are not many reviews on the Amazon site at this point - one, to be exact - on Ice Crawlers, and it is not that bad a movie, and deserves a somewhat-decent review, I thought I would attempt to give one.

It is a shame that there isn't any picture of the cover on the DVD and the VHS on the Amazon site, because it is quite an artsy cover, which led me to me think that maybe it was a low-budget film of not that great a quality.

Although it is true that the movie is not as artsy as the cover - and some might argue that the cover is the best thing about the movie - that is not true: The movie does have a well-done style - considering the low-budget and limited time they were dealing with (even the director admits that the film has a very solid look for a low-budget film, most low-budget films don't look that good).

Ice Crawlers is done in the deliberate style of the horror films of the fifties, and for what it is, despite criticism I found against it on the Internet, it is quite well done.

Typical of fifties horror films, there is very little blood and gore, and the monster is only seen in glimpses until the very end - in the tradition of the old rubber creature (although a bit more than that, as explained by the director), and in this case, a creature not seen that often in any movie.

There wasn't any CGI used except for one scene, and it wasn't on the monster. I will leave it for you to figure out, or let the director tell you.

I enjoyed the interview with the director and his commentary.

The story itself is that basic story of a group of individuals - in an isolated, icy region somewhere - being picked off one by one by some creature.

Although I admit that I would prefer watching - the original THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, Carpenter's THE THING, and the ALIEN - I still enjoyed it - which, speaking of THE THING, they actually bought stock footage from that movie, and they used stock footage of ice and snow from other sources.

The introductive lettering and some blue coloring, looking like a big splotch in the film, made me think that this was going to be of very poor quality - but it quickly moved away from that.

The director deliberately paced everything so that it got better and better towards the end, and, although the actors won't win any academy awards for their performances, I found my self being caught in excitement as they portrayed their characters in confrontations and very worked-up over their situation.

This was more a thriller to me than a horror film, although it had all of the elements - the monster, people dying, some gore, and some blood - and it did startle me pretty good at times.

I wouldn't recommend this movie for everyone - but if you like quality b-horror films, and don't need CGI to enjoy it, you will probably find this a good movie to rent. As far as buying, if you're a collector of this sort, then yes - other than that, probably not.

About 40 minutes into the 80 minute movie I was waiting for it to be over. The acting was the typical so-so, except for David Millber as Dr. Jacobson, who was just plain bad. He appeared to have acquired his acting ability from watching the villain in 1950's B grade horror movies. PLOT SPOILER: I was glade to see him get shot. Too bad it wasn't in the first scene.

The suspense build-up was lost on the cutting room floor, as if they hired Japanese Godzilla editors to do the final cutting. The crazy Norwegian would have been better as a Randy Quaid conspiracy buff type, once molested by aliens, a lighter character was needed. The film had great potential to be a successful hit, it just needed some adjusting. Rent it over a slasher film. Rated "R" for "brief sexuality." They couldn't even get that right.

Ice Crawlers (2002) Very low budget sci-fi horror film has a large shady corporation sending several bright college students to help out at a fancy high tech state of the art Antarctic oil drilling station thanks to their professor. Unfortunately, the new super drills have reached a little too far down in the search for the black gold, the Texas tea, and soon the station is invaded by coffee table sized trilobites (prehistoric cockroaches). Now it's the humans vs the bugs, and no one may make it back to civilization alive. This one almost makes it thanks to its director, makeup effects whiz John Carl Buechler (director of Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood), who coincidentally hired John Carl Buechler's Magical Media Industries to handle the creature effects. Although severely hampered by the low budget, he gets a fair amount of mileage out of the money he had, shooting at a California water treatment plant that stands in well for the oil station and utilizing footage purchased from Universal Studios' The Thing (1982) for his brief snowy exteriors and helicopter shots. The creature effects are decent too, done live with no CGI that I saw, which is to be applauded, though the physical effects have a couple of problems too as the trilobites' supposedly hard shell exoskeleton does reveal its rubbery origins in some of the more strenuous action sequences. The biggest problems, and they are big, lie with the script and the actors. The script is a little too aware it is for a low budget movie, with long stretches of dialogue, dialogue, and then for variety's sake more dialogue between every moment of suspense or action. And all of that incessant talking shows how inadequate the actors playing the college students are, and since they are center stage for the biggest part of the running time, it doesn't matter that the older members of the mostly unknown cast (including Gotz Otto, the henchman from Tomorrow Never Dies) are actually pretty good; in the end the tedium of the bad younger actors mouthing way too much sleep inducing dialogue drops this one pretty far below the minimum entertainment level required for recommendation. Better luck next time, guys!

Wow, what can I say, I wasn't expecting much when I ordered it...and I'm glad I did that. The plot is bland (drilling/explosives in the artic awaken some weird creatures), the acting sucks, effects (ones not lifted from "THE THING") suck...

I give the makers an extra star, just for trying something new...but if you want some sort of ancient killer bug, then use a Meganula (giant ancient dragon fly), but not Trilobites, they don't seem very scary... AT ALL. I find it funny that this thing kills just about everyone because the morons either stop running or fall...it's dumb...

The creature itself is lame, whatcha expect from a Trilobite with two tentacles. The "Queen" (Must EVERY bug based movie have one)is a simple puppet.

If your looking for a good bug monster on a killing spree movie, then I suggest "SPIDERS" or "MIMIC", but this was painful. Oh, on a side note, I think the makers want you to have a seizure...everytime the creature kills we get a bunch of flashes of scenes from earlier in the film, REALLY gets on your nerves...

So yea, stay away.

This movie would have been better if they had let you see the creature sooner. It takes over an hour before you get a good look at it and by then at least 5 people are already dead. When the insect makes its appearance it's not bad for a low budget movie. This makes the last 15 minutes of the movie exciting. Unfortunately the first hour plus is boring. None of the characters are particularly interesting and neither is all the talk about illegal drilling techniques. At least four people are killed before anyone takes notice, including the doctor who was in charge. Their needed to be more suspense and a better idea of what kind of creature they were dealing with earlier in the movie.

You have to admit---a monster that is part worm/mosquito and has tentacles to boot, is an original idea. ICE CRAWLERS sets no new standards for monster movies, but it's done in such a creepy, let's go back to the fifties style, that it worked for me. There is some confusion in the beginning as to what the two "scientists" are really up to, but we know it's no good. John Carl Buechler (who got his start on one of the Friday the 13th movies) does an admirable job in creating atmospheric tension, and draws acceptable performances from a cast of unknowns. (Unless you saw RODENTZ, which featured Allen Lee Haff, who plays the cowboy Ernest in this one). There are some comic relief moments, especially when hunky Tom tells someone they have more conspiracy theories than an Oliver Stone movie. Overall, the creature effects are good---the shots are quick, and even when it's full frontal, it looks pretty menacing. The ending is appropriate, and of course, leaves the door open for a sequel.
Entertaining, if derivative.