Hypothermia (2012)

Simply Perfect

How sad is this?

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is a throwback to old school creature features from back in the day. This film stars fellow Alabama native Michael Rooker as Ray Pelletier. Ray is a humble family man, and ice fisherman. Blanche Baker (from The Girl Next Door) co stars as his loving wife Helen. The Pelletier clan plan on a relaxing weekend with their son David & his girlfriend Gina. The relaxing ice fishing weekend comes to an abrupt stop as the Pelletier family is introduced to the very obnoxious Steve Cote and his son Stevie (played by The Flash's Greg Finley). The two families eventually team up in a act of survival as night falls. In the of cover darkness, something BIG has awakened from the cold waters of the remote frozen lake beneath them. The aquatic creature begins to stalk both families. There is a few great scares from the creature and some nice gore effects. That sadly comes to a end as the creature finally rears its ugly head. The monster itself reminds me of a sleestack monster from the LAND OF THE LOST series back in the 80's.The film itself has a Runtime of 73 min. So, it doesn't have much time to delve into the creature or create a backstory of said monster. Nor does it go into the dynamic of either of the families.The dialogue is somewhat simple as it mainly consists of LOTS of F Bombs & Profanity from Don Wood's character. Don Wood who plays Steve Cote perfectly creates a very unlikable character. So much in fact, you want him to die first.I'd also like to mention to those film aficionados...there is a cool lil homage from JAWS in there when one of the actors says "We're gonna need a bigger hole." Rooker and Baker do a great job as always especially with what they have to work with. I would have liked to see more story and better creature effects. As I mentioned before, it's a independent creature feature. That being said, it's a fun flick but don't expect too much from it.

Ray (Rooker) and Helen (Baker) have planned a day ice fishing with their son David (Forster) and his girlfriend Gina (Amy Chang) on a frozen lake. The family is interrupted by a loudmouth father Steve (Wood) and his son Stevie Jr. (Greg Finley) who make noise and scare the fish away. A confrontation is avoided when Ray accepts the invite for beers at their portable trailer that they have parked on the ice. Stevie Jr. is pulled into the water and is bit by a creature that no one sees. Ray and Helen urge the father to gets his son to a doctor but he refuses. The families soon realize they are up against a creature that is below the ice that is looking at them as prey. Writer/Director James Felix McKenney sets up this story well with Rooker as a good guy for once and then lets us down completely when the monster under the ice is revealed. The only way to describe the man in the wet suit with some fake looking teeth and googly eyes would be to say this is 1958 and this was all the filmmakers could come up with. The problem is its 2011, and all though no one wants to see another crappy CGI monster wrecking another movie, someone should have said 'no' when this was decided on. The movie manages to have some fun anyway benefiting from the decent set up, and one well timed jolt that comes when David is killed. Everything is taken seriously and then the stupid looking creature shows up and ruins everything.

The acting from most of the cast on this was okay, the setting was suitably bleak and the basic premise of this film was good. The problem for me were the effects and especially the creature itself. The very basic quality of the effects took what could have been an okay horror to something that was, at times, laughable. I did actually laugh out loud when the "creature" ran across the ice looking strangely similar to an ungainly man trying to run in flippers. Considering at other points of the film, the creature's speed on the ice is an integral part of the plot, you would have thought somebody would have looked at the scenes of it running and said "that looks crap" but apparently nobody spoke up. It would have actually been better if the creature had never been shown at all. I realise that this film did not have a huge budget but there have been other small budget films where the horror factor has been huge with the use of suspense and without the use of fancy dress shop outfits. Overall, quite disappointing.

I'd read the other user reviews of this movie, noting the criticisms of the creature's appearance, i.e., how poor the costume was. I thought that it couldn't be as bad as the other reviewers said that it was, could it? Yes. Yes, it was. It was quite possibly one of the worst attempts at creature creation that I've ever seen. The creature was CGI'd as it swam about under the ice, why wouldn't the film makers just continue the practice when the monster appeared above the ice? The monster's costume looked like someone took a speed skater's uniform, dyed it black, sewed some webbing under the arms, and tossed in a rubber fish head mask. It really was that bad. Going with an actor in a live action costume over a computer generated creature added absolutely nothing to the movie; if anything, it detracted from the film.I've seen Michael Rooker in other movies, particularly "Slither" and "Tombstone", and he usually turns in solid performances. In this film, he was about as provocative as a slice of dry white toast. But his lackluster performance was far from the only thing wrong with this movie.Rooker's family, in the movie, hauls from their shoreline cabin, a small makeshift ice fishing encampment using only a small child's wooden sled. Later, this same distance is deemed as insurmountable by almost any means. What is even stupider is that later in the movie, as Rooker's character, along with his wife and his son's girlfriend, head for their cabin, Rooker's character surveys the ice with a pair of binoculars. His wife asks him if he can see any traps laid by the monster along the way. Rooker replies that he doesn't see any, that there's only a big hole in the ice near the shore, not too far from their cabin.Gee, there's no reason why a deadly predatory beast would emerge through a huge, convenient hole in the ice, is there? Even more bizarre and ridiculous is the empathic/telepathic communication between Blanche Baker's character and the monster at the end of the film.Yes, this movie is that stupid. It endeavors to be a sort of ice fishing version of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" and it fails miserably.By the way, the costume for the Black Lagoon creatures is literally hundreds of times better than the costume for the monster in "Hypothermia".