Eco-Horror Part II: The Thaw

This movie made weird choices. Not all of them were meant to be entertaining, but most of them were anyway.

The plot unfolds something like this: An Arctic research station finds a woolly mammoth in a melting glacier, and quickly discover the cause of it's death: a particularly ravenous parasite. What they decide to do next might permanently change the course of human life on this planet, as long as everything goes according to plan...

This movie stars Val Kilmer: But also, he's barely in the film. At the start of the film we watch his video-journal entry on the subject of their discovery, but he doesn't really show up again until much, much later.

This guy should have died three mins in.

Cross contamination? What's that?: Most of the people we see doing scientific work in the film are students, but between them there's almost zero understanding of what could contain a bug infestation. You'd think at least one of them must have lived somewhere where cockroaches were a problem, or had an entomology class, or even a minimum understanding of how air ducts work. But no, they all think doors will stop bugs from leaving a room, and it's hilarious.

Some interesting gore: In this otherwise tame movie there's some fun gross-out effects, not the least of which when they amputate someone's limb!

Well that escalated quickly: [SPOILERS] The original research team goes from "oh, a woolly mammoth" to "let's unleash the world's greatest plague" in record time. It's sort of a refreshing portrayal of eco-activists, where normally they'd be clueless tree-hugging-hippies or over-the-top characters of evil, but it really goes from zero to 60 in record time.

But did we like it?: It was entertaining, in a CW show kind of way.

The Bay

The Bay is a horror movie based in 85% truth. The filmmakers were making a documentary when they discovered multiple long-form news stories on the very subject they were tackling. They were completely disheartened to find those stories were already largely being ignored by the public, or buried, or both. Then it struck them to shift gears: they'd take their groundwork and turn the project into a found-footage style horror movie. The result would be a creepy horror movie you can't get out of your head for days, that would be largely ignored by the public, or buried, or both.

The plot unfolds something like this: Our narrator, Jaquline, guides us through crowd sourced footage she's edited together in an effort to shed light on the events surrounding a July 4th celebration in a small town off the Chesapeake Bay. She uses footage from the boat of a pair of scientists investigating a massive fish die-off, from an animal rights activist breaking into a poultry farm, from police dashcams, and from the fluff-piece she was shooting for a local network affiliate. She takes us from the mere indication something is wrong, to the eventual take down of most of the town. What is responsible for this mass destruction? The answer won't make you sleep better at night...

Extra creepy part: During a scene in the offices of the (totally out of the loop and buried in bureaucracy) CDC, screens display images from the office-drones collective internet searches. All the images shown are from the real world. It's spectacularly effective at making you squirm as you realize “I've seen those images before...”.

Prepare to wonder the whole movie trough: What parts of this movie are the 85% true parts?

Cinematic style: Yes it's a found footage film, and the narrator is sort of annoying, but those things are forgivable because the rest of the movie is amazing!

Yep, that director of: Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam, Wag the Dog, Sphere, Sleepers, Toys...