Customer Reviews
A BY THE BOOK CREATURE FEATURE - By: stuart, 31 Oct 2007 
At a secret Antarctic base, teacher Ted Jacobson, (David Milbern) & students Curtis, (Allen Lee Haff) Arianna, (Karen Nieci) Tom, (Howard Holcomb) Kate, (Rebekah Ryan) & Update, (David Lenneman) arrive to do some extra credit work in each of their different fields. The project leaders, Nelson, (Gotz Otto) & Dr. Monica Kelsey, (Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld) are upset about their lack of experience in the real world, but once their actual mission is revealed, they alll express the desire to leave earlier. A strange series of deaths strikes the camp, keeping them trapped in the station. Finallly getting a clue as to what's been behind the attacks, they band together to survive the creatures attacking the crew.
The Good News: There is a few decent qualities to this film. First off, I actuallly enjoyed the creatures in here. It's a big improvement over the usual bugs & giant insect swarms that tend to dominate these kinds of films. Having the creature in here is a bit of a plus & gives it a slight degree of originality in a big sea of unoriginality. They even looked pretty decent, & came across quite well, especiallly the one at the end. It's a big shame it wasn't on more, it reallly looked impressive & quite nice looking. It even caused a few halfway nice sequences along the way. The easiest one to determine this was the mineshaft chase, a long chase through the bowels of the station & out into the halllways & down into an elevator, with the frequently-used suspense-building trick of the chased victim franticallly pressing a button hoping it would close before it got to the door. Here's a great example of that, & it comes off quite nicely. Even though there isn't a lot of gore, the pretty decent sized body count is a little consolation, offering up some thrills here & there. These are the main things about it, though.
The Bad News: This is just a plain, by-the-numbers creature feature affair. There's reallly nothing here to distinguish it from just about alll the other monster films out there, except for the setting. There's generallly no surprises & it plays itself out pretty straightforward, which makes this a pretty skip-able in the stakes & not reallly be out of the loop. All the plot points are there as well: the threat attacks a loner in the prologue, the introduction of the characters with barely a warning of who's who, the eventual study of the problem that discovers the threat, the discovery of the truth for the expedition, & the quick turnaround by a character previously thought to be bad. It's alll been done before to much better results in the other section that this one might not be seen as a top priority much. It's alll so predictable that it never even tries to change up the formula, which is what makes these movies fun. That's the biggest problem, but the ending, which not only is so rushed & over so quickly that it barely leaves an impression even after just viewing it, but it also stretches the laws of credibility to the point that it's just unbelievable. In no way would that scenario ever play out in a modern world, & it reallly doesn't work. An original but annoying trick right before a person is going to get killed where a couple of flashes of earlier scenes with the victim has potential, but it quickly wears old. There's a few more things wrong, but they don't need to be revealed here.
The Final Verdict: This is just a little bit below decent fare for creature feature films, & might hold some interest for hardcore fans of the genre, but will more likely have more of an impact on those that love cheesy films or the low-grade entertainment.
