This week’s IFC Midnight release is a little horror film called Blood Glacier. If I were judging the film based on the name alone, this would get two very enthusiastic thumbs up as it sounds like a song the band Dethklok, from the cartoon Metalocalypse, would sing. In fact, that is something I would very much like to hear but, unfortunately, the name only does so much for a film.
Blood Glacier is about a group of scientists at a climate observation station in the Alps who discover a blood-like substance pouring from a nearby melting glacier. When this blood comes into contact with nearby wildlife, the animals begin to change into monstrous creatures that the team has to defend themselves against in order to survive out there in the middle of nowhere.
Instantly I was entertained by the obvious voice over work. It was like watching an old Japanese kung fu film where the mouths don’t move with the words and the voices don’t quite fit with the emotions. I might have preferred subtitles instead if I didn’t feel like all of the extra effort people would make to read them would take away from the focus on the creatures.
The monsters are created from organisms in the glacier. The theory they use is that a fox drinks the blood water from the glacier and then eats a beetle. The organisms from the blood water mix with the beetle in the fox’s stomach and the resulting creature bursts out of the fox. Mosquitos drinking the blood of these creatures become infected as well as anything that comes into contact with that mosquito.
The creatures themselves are pretty terrifying. They vary from mutated insects to ibex and everything in between. Sometimes they are almost comedic looking, like the zombie deer head from Evil Dead 2 but other times the idea of these things existing is absolutely horrifying.
Blood Glacier is an obvious throwback to films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien with a small touch of The X-Files. There are moments of extreme cheese, extreme gore and extreme awesomeness, all together making one extremely bad ass film.
Blood Glacier is now available from IFC Midnight. Order yourself a copy today!
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Ann Hale is the horror editor for Pop-Break.com and a senior contributing writer, reviewing horror movies and television shows. She is also the American Correspondent for Lovehorror.co.uk. Ann attended East Carolina University, majoring in English Literature. She is a collector of Halloween (the film) memorabilia and is a self-admitted opinionated horror nerd. You can follow her, her collection and her cat, Edward Kittyhands on Twitter and Instagram @Scarletjupiter
