By When I heard there was a movie titled Blood Glacier, I knew I wanted to see it. After learning about its premise, my heart was set on it. What Blood Glacier ended up being was more, oh — so much more, than I ever expected.
I was able to catch a screening of Blood Glacier at this year’s Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2). While C2E2 is a comics convention, I’m sure the show organizers expected there to be enough of an overlap of horror movie fans to make the screening worthwhile. A small crowed gathered for the screening, most of which was made up of knowledgeable horror fans, unlike myself. Disclaimer: I know pretty much nothing about horror movies, they’re just not my thing. What I do know about however, is “so bad it’s good” movies, and in that sense, Blood Glacier was right up my alley.
Blood Glacier
Director: Marvin Kren
Not Rated
Release Date: May 2nd, 2014 (US)
Blood Glacier takes place in the glacial Austrian Alps where a group of scientists are going about their daily work, drudging along and preparing for a visit from their hiking-enthusiast Prime Minister, when they find a peculiar glacier high up in the mountains that appears to be oozing a reddish liquid. They take some samples from the glacier to study and soon begin to find mutated, super-aggressive animals roaming the desolate, mountainous landscape — just as the Prime Minister’s hiking party is approaching of course.
Blood Glacier soon devolves into a series of pseudo-slasher scenes that don’t ever seem quite sure how self-aware they were supposed to be. In one particularly comical scene, the female Prime Minister bores through the skull of a mutated Ibex with a power drill while screaming at the top of her lungs – this scene got waves of giggles from the audience I saw the movie with and seemed intentionally over-the-top. However, Blood Glacier is full of other scenes where they characters are being attacked by what clearly look like semi-believable puppets at best, and in those moments the movie seemed to be attempting to be pretty genuine. It was genuinely trying and genuinely confusing.
And the editing. Oh god, the editing.
For the most part Blood Glacier is a pretty coherent movie, the premise may be absolutely stupid but it is laid out pretty clearly. Sometimes though, the editing in the movie makes some extremely basic mistakes. Things like a character jumping from laying down to standing up, a giant bird-mutant attacking a person then cutting to a stab-wound, etc. At times the editing in Blood Glacier is pretty awful, but it’s also that much more fun to watch.
From a “so bad it’s good” standpoint, Blood Glacier is enjoyable, but not particularly stellar. It’s something that I’d recommend to check out based on its goofy premise and unintentional hilarity, but it doesn’t have the same level of constant “so bad it’s good” fun as say The Room or Troll 2. Blood Glacier is a bit too long and it bit too boring to be in my “so bad it’s good” canon. However, I totally had a great time watching it, and would watch it again with friends in a heartbeat.
Oh and guys, the ending. The ending of this movie. I can’t spoil it for you, but it has one of the most unintentionally hysterical, completely serious and oblivious endings of all time. At the end of watching Blood Glacier, the entire theater was laughing their butts off and loving every second of it.