The Thaw (2009)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) There’s a blunt-force environmental parable at the heart of The Thaw that makes it more interesting than the usual B-grade monster movie. The premise is that global warming is warming up the polar ice cap, and freeing ancient parasites that are all too ready to contaminate some tasty humans. This mildly provocative (but hardly unique) idea aside, the rest of The Thaw plays like a remix of The Thing and most other zombie movies, with over-the-top gore when the characters have to lop off body parts in order to survive, or perish with spectacular parasitic body horror sequences. There’s a slight late-film twist, but it’s not much—much of the film plays strictly according to genre conventions of young characters being stuck in a place with an unspeakable horror, down to the dum-dum-DUM coda. A still-healthy Val Kilmer shows up in a lead role that ends up being a supporting performance with gravitas. Cinematically, writer-director Mark A. Lewis doesn’t really do anything all that spectacular despite having arctic scenery to play with. It pretty much confirms the lower-side-of-average nature of The Thaw, which is not outright bad but doesn’t do much to elicit enthusiasm.