Blood and Snow

I went in hoping for something good. I LOVED "The Thing" and it's remake. I was let down. The acting was nauseating; I didn't believe any emotion any of the actors tried to portray. This is a college level movie, at best. The characters are one dimensional and have no growth. The story line is completely predictable. I blame the writer. This was hashed out in a drunken weekend. Movies are meant to transport us out of our own lives. To immerse ourselves in something we will never experience. All I felt in watching this movie was "when is the good part coming.". I have nothing bad to say about any of the actors; but, I don't have anything good to say either. I'd pass on watching this.

Right, well I had, of course, never heard about the 2023 sci-fi horror movie "Blood and Snow" from director Jesse Palangio, prior to stumbling upon it by random chance here in 2024. Of course I opted to sit down and watch the movie, on account of it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen.

The storyline in "Blood and Snow" felt like a watered down homage to the classic John Carpenter movie "The Thing", except "Blood and Snow" was lacking the entertaining storyline, the good cast and the impressive special effects that "The Thing" had. In fact, "Blood and Snow" had nothing even remotely close to what "The Thing" had. And it felt like writers Rossa McPhillips and Simon Phillips weren't even trying.

The narrative in the movie is slow paced, and there isn't exactly a whole lot of anything overly interesting happening. And that makes sitting through "Blood and Snow" quite an ordeal. I was close to giving up on watching it several times throughout the course of the 93 minute runtime.

Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with actor Vernon Wells. And lets just be honest here, he isn't exactly A-list material. The acting performances in the movie were fair enough, despite the fact that the actors and actresses had nothing to work with in terms of an interesting or entertaining script, or a detailed character gallery.

If you enjoy horror movies, and if you have an ounce of love of "The Thing", do yourself a favor and give "Blood and Snow" a wide berth. It simply isn't worth the effort. I ended up tossing the towel in the ring 55 minutes into the boredom that is "Blood and Snow", by then I just couldn't take any more of the suffering.

My rating of this dumpster fire of a movie lands on a generous two out of ten stars.

Going into this I had high hopes. It gave off The Thing vibes and I'm obsessed with that and was hoping for more out of this. This had potential at the start but strays way off when they get to base and its a wanna be Thing plot. They could've done so much with the story! That would be a long rant on that so I'll go on. The acting was hit and miss. The plot got all messy. When they do find out key things they do nothing when they could've turned it into a cool story. The cut off at the end was a slap in the face, like why even bother? In the end it's a cluster "duck" of confusion and stupidity. It lacked pulling the plot together and explaining the situation and people along with both of the "victims" of the start. Writer gives up I'd say or they probably had people walk on them it got so messy.

Decent acting and nice cinematography of snow covered town where a geologist gets infected by a virus like the thing. Lower your expectations and it's not a bad watch. Clearly director didn't have money to do creature effects so there are no creatures just people pretending to be infected. For thing fans it's still worth a watch but don't expect the quality of even John Carpenter's original. Saw this on Tubi so hard to complain when it's free. Give this a chance for a low budget body snatchers movie as there's worse movies out there. TBH there's not much horror but still not a bad who goes there drama.

I'm sure glad I'm just a "movie watcher" and not a "film buff", so I can enjoy watching a decent movie, without picking everything apart. In my humble opinion, the acting was good and the story all held together. I gave it a 7, which is probably high, but just trying to offset all of the unwarranted terrible ratings. Certainly derivative of "The Thing", without all the cool creature effects, but nothing wrong with that. Hey, no one complained about West Side Story being derivative of Romeo and Juliet, did they? Okay, have I typed enough characters yet? I guess not quite yet. How about now? I did it!