BLOOD PREDATOR (2007)
The brain child of writer/director Paul Gagne, whose previous efforts include THE DA VINCI TREASURE, this is the kind of film that makes me want to stop watching movies. It's 90 minutes of sheer endurance for the hapless viewer.
The plot: seven people are flying to a ski weekend in Colorado when the pilot is forced to crash-land in the mountains. They make their way to a remote cabin, where they find a broken-down Snow Cat vehicle that they try and fail to fix. As fate would have it, the cabin's basement is inhabited by flesh-eating extraterrestrials, who wait until a good 65 minutes into the film before they attack their human prey.
BLOOD PREDATOR has two types of characters: annoying and loathsome. There's the blustery rich guy with a stereotyped dumb blonde girlfriend, an incompetent mechanic with a bitchy wife, a lesbian who just lost her lover to cancer, and a pot-smoking snowboarder with a girlfriend who's not even one-dimensional. It's never explained what happened to the pilot. I'll assume he died in the crash.
The lion's share of the (in)action occurs in the supposedly snowbound cabin. I say “supposedly” because the ground is decidedly free of snow. That makes the ongoing efforts to fix the broken Snow Cat seem kind of pointless. And by “efforts,” I mean repeatedly turning the key in the ignition. Also featured is a classic bad-film cliché: the six-shooter that never needs reloading. And the barrel has green paint on it so they could CGI in some muzzle blasts.
BLOOD PREDATOR's estimated budget was $250,000. Given the end result, that figure sounds excessive. What could they possibly have spent that money on? Licensing for the endless classical song that plays on a portable radio?
ITEM: The film establishes that the aliens eat the flesh of their victims, whose bones they leave in the basement. And yet, when they kill one character, not only don't they eat the dude's flesh, they dump his body in the front yard.
ITEM: I've seen hospital basements smaller than that cabin's. There's also a trapdoor in the basement's ceiling, but what could it lead to? The attic? Only if M.C. Escher designed it!
ITEM: When the character named John climbs through the trapdoor, he describes what he sees. Imagine if they had budget to show it!
ITEM: The film includes a gratuitous—and decidedly un-erotic—lesbian sex scene.
ITEM: The dead aliens look nothing like when they were alive. They're also far and away the worst CGI monsters I've ever seen. And the “flamethrower” effect is even more pathetic!
ITEM: The “snow” piled up outside the cabin's window looks a whole lot like packing peanuts.
ITEM: There just happens to be a case of dynamite in the cabin. God knows how old or stable it is, but don't expect the script to take that into consideration. And how do our plucky survivors get the dynamite to ignite? With a bear trap also lying around the cabin! (Good thing nobody stepped in it.)
ITEM: The film ends with two survivors, one of whom says, “Let's go home.” But how? They're snowbound in the mountains! And having blown up the cabin, they're outside in the freezing cold in nothing heavier than sweaters. Sure, the aliens are all dead, but they could be next! Ever heard of hypothermia? Frostbite? Trench foot? An unsatisfying ending to a movie that should never have begun.
