Okay, fine, I get it, have a tri-syllabic movie title that includes the word “blood” in it automatically makes you sing a certain shitty song from the 80’s. Can’t we just be adults and talk about Blood Glacier without drawing these comparisons?! Sheesh! It’s like we can’t have serious discussions about a glacier of blood. Wait, is it made of blood? Does it flood on blood? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT NEED TO BE ANSWERED! Anyways, with a title as on-the-nose as this movie, you kind of have to understand that the movie can only take itself seriously to a point. My spoiler-free review is that, yes, there are moments where the movie feels goofy, but it plays things straight, for the most part. As straight as a movie called “Blood Glacier” can take itself, at least.
Look at this cool dog! She should have been the star of the movie!
In the Austrian Alps, a team of scientists are working to collect rocks or study weather or something. It doesn’t REALLY matter, because everything gets all fucked up. Due to global warming, an area that used to be covered in sheets of ice have now been exposed, and one glacier in particular looks like it’s covered in some sort of red stuff. Ya know, come to think of it, it almost looks like it’s covered in blood! While collecting a sample of what the red substance can be, one of the scientist’s dog is attacked and injured by some sort of feral animal. Once the sample is analyzed, it’s determined that it’s a simple-celled organism that acts as an incubator and force of change. Once inside an animal’s stomach, it gathers and combines the DNA of anything in there, incubates, and a new hybrid animal comes out. The rest of the movie consists of these researchers trying to not get killed by combinations of fox and mosquitoes and birds of prey and louses and then those hybrids hybridizing each other. Point of the story? Stop global warming now or some weird, wild stuff will start happening.
Really wish they had stuck with the original tagline of “Looks like it’s Mother Nature’s time of the month.”
Meh. Imagine if I left the review at just that? Just “Meh”? That would be goofy. Unfortunately, that really sums up my feelings on the movie. On the one hand, I enjoyed the originality of what was causing these creatures in the first place and the explanation of how they came to exist. Man was a factor in it, but it’s not like humans were performing radioactive nuclear experiments resulting in these monsters. I also thought some of the practical effects were done very well, specifically a head crushing sequence and some impromptu leg surgery. On the other hand, having such strong practical effects with scenes of violence left me disappointed with the creature design and how those creatures were executed. The creatures were mostly shown in close-ups, and those shots all felt kind of goofy. If the whole movie was kind of goofy in tone, something along the lines of Dog Soldiers, that’s totally fine, but the goofiness of the creatures stood out against the relatively serious tone of the rest of the movie. Once you see the reveal of the final creature in the last scene of the movie, it’s kind of hard to take anything you just saw seriously. Using practical effects in movies these days is a bit risky, and although I could appreciate what Blood Glacier was going for, I never knew whether I should be laughing at it or laughing with it.
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