Directed by Tibor Takács, 2007
Written by Eric Miller

Remember Patrick Muldoon, the douchebaggy pilot who tried to break up the star crossed love of Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards in Starship Troopers?  Ever wondered what he was up to these days?  Ice Spiders.  Yes, Ice Spiders.  Ice Fucking Spiders is what he is up to.

I see a commercial for a movie called Ice Spiders and my brain uses a portion of its finite number of cells to fire off a scolding synapse along the lines of, "Don’t think for a second that you can live your life having never seen a movie called Ice Spiders!"

Yeah, I’m that guy.  Not only am I that guy, but I’m that guy who then goes onto the Internet and writes an actual review of a movie called Ice Spiders.  I like being that guy, but Christ I have got to stop doing this…this shit.

Seriously?  Ice Spiders?  Patrick Muldoon?  Sci-Fi Channel?   Why do I do this to myself?

Yes, I know what I’m getting into before ever popping in a movie like this.  I am never surprised, but I am almost always disappointed.  Making a bad movie is, perhaps, one of the easiest things on the planet to do.  I believe in terms of difficulty it ranks slightly behind sleeping.  If you are a producer on a movie called Ice Spiders, please embrace it.  Make it the good kind of bad.  The upgrade between the two is not that hard.  Just admit you’re not going to be making a good film and give in to making the best bad film you can.

Alas, yet again, someone somewhere made the decision that a script called Ice Spiders could make for a decent movie.  Someone missed the common sense social lesson on the superiority of being laughed with versus being laughed at.  And thus we have giant spiders that have escaped from one of those ultramegahyper secret labs inside a building seemingly made only of exposed pipes.  Fortunately it is the end of the tourist season, so the nearby ski resort only has a couple dozen people, including a high school (I think?) ski team, available as snacks for the clearly unstoppable monsters of ultimate death.

Eric Miller’s script is a complete mess, and I don’t mean that from a narrative standpoint.  I really don’t care if the plot of something called Ice Spiders is believable or not, but at least remember what you just finished writing before you nullify it a page later.  Characters reference other characters who have previously died as if they’re still there while other characters constantly confuse whether they’ve just gone ‘down here’ or ‘up there’, sometimes when they haven’t even moved.  When they are first introduced, our noble, attractive Doc clearly states there are only 5 spiders.  In the span of about 15 minutes that figure changes to 6 spiders and by the end of the movie the number morphs to 7.  It is one thing to not care whether more bullets have been fired from a gun than ammunition it contains, it is an entirely different matter to invent new bad guys whenever the plot calls for it.

I know everyone from the producers to the director to the screenwriter to the best boy was doing this solely for the paycheck, but damn.  I didn’t think it was possible for so many people to simultaneously phone it in.  Patrick Muldoon is a rabidly smug actor in the worst way.  The CGI department lacked a budget to render the textureless spider models with the frame rate they required, turning 8 legs into a constant blur.  The elite soldier team guarding the building full of exposed pipes not only lack anything realistically considered a military wardrobe (well, I’m no soldier so I could be wrong, but the combination of a wife beater in the snow may actually yield some kind of bulletproof forcefield), but their clothing isn’t even the same color from person to person.

Faced with a movie like Ice Spiders you already know you’re grading on a curve.  However, there isn’t enough padding in the human heart to pretend Ice Spiders contributes any joy to the world.  It won’t ruin any lives, so I guess that is something, but it exists knowing it contributes nothing, which is a ballsy kind of carelessness that just depresses me.  At least the production put some food on the table for a number of people in front of and behind the screen.  That has to count for something, right?