Scientists working in the German Alps discover that a glacier is leaking
a liquid that appears to be affecting local wildlife.
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After his promising hourlong debut, the zombies-in-Berlin film, Rammbock, Austrian director Marvin Kren turns things up a notch for The Station (Blutgletscher), a feature-length thriller-horror hybrid featuring mutated mountain creatures that appear at an Alpine glacier that’s mysteriously covered in a red substance that looks like blood.
Again written by Kren’s regular collaborator Benjamin Hessler, this is another compact genre item that offers enough variations on established clichés (from films like John Carpenter’s The Thing
especially) to keep things pacey and entertaining. The science employed
to explain the crossbreeding that creates the unsurprisingly aggressive
animals is somewhat murky, but thrill-seeking fans are unlikely to
object as this is a creature feature that’s all about how to battle the
beasties -- hint: always keep a core drill handy -- and not how they
came into this world, which seems of secondary interest at best.
The closest the film has to a hero is Janek (Gerhard Liebmann), an antisocial drunk who runs around in his underwear outside despite the high altitude and who’s been slightly off his rocker ever since his girlfriend, Tanja (Edita Malovcic), who was also a scientist at the station, left him. He’s also one of the few people able to repair the equipment up at the station and its unmanned outposts, and it’s on one of these missions that he discovers that a glacier has been seemingly drenched in blood, which, in turn, has affected mountain wildlife.
On the same day, Tanja is due to make her return to the station to accompany a group that includes a state minister (Brigitte Kren, the director’s actress mother and a recent contestant on Austria’s Dancing with the Stars) on an official visit. Both the visitors, slowly hiking their way up, and the scientists at the titular research facility are in for several prolonged attacks from the mutant mountain insects, birds and mammals that have become infected by the red ooze.
Kren’s preference for mechanical effects over CGI gives The Station an old-school look that works especially well for the smaller mutated creatures, such as a basketball-sized insect hybrid that Janek inadvertently locates when he relieves himself in the mountains (one of the film's numerous instances of humor).
But though the enormous creatures, from a flying nightmare attacking the minister’s delegation to a monster that starts to pound the titular location, are mostly shown in quick flashes and often in the dark, they never quite look convincing enough to scare up a storm, though the ominous soundscape and the score of Stefan Will and Marco Dreckkotter (both Rammbock alumni) work overtime to compensate for this, with the music especially giving this no-doubt modestly budgeted feature a more epic allure. Moritz Schultheiss's widescreen cinematography is another huge plus as it beautifully showcases the majestic locations.
Though quite a few end up (spoiler alert?) as creature fast-food, screenwriter Hessler nonetheless manages to quickly sketch an impressive gallery of adult characters -- refreshingly, there’s barely a teenager in sight -- from the serious scientist (Hille Beseler) who turns into a scream queen overnight to the bearded old local (Wolfgang Pampel, who looks like he escaped from a Swiss chocolate or cheese commercial) whose ingrained stoicism is severely tested when faced with the ferocious mutated species. Janek and the minister are the two most fully drawn characters, with Kren and Liebmann clearly having a ball.
Hessler and Kren even manage to sneak in hints of a love story amid the mayhem that has a fitting ending that’s both unexpectedly tender and disturbing.
Trailer:
Movie Rating (max. 5 Stars):
Summary:
A fresh Austrian horror movie, with unknown actors, but last not least great actors. Suspension and a great story make this movie to an insiders tip for horror movie fans like me, so a great, "horrible" .....
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Reverences:
www.imbd.com
www.theguardian.com
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