As God is my witness, I don’t know how anyone could screw up any film with a description like this one:
“At a secret mountain-top government lab, a visionary scientist breeds giant spiders in order to use their super-strong silk to make lightweight body armor and new weapons. Suddenly, the aggressive spiders escape, invading a nearby ski resort and embarking on a killing spree among the guests and staff. Now, it’s up to the mad scientist’s colleague and a former star skier to take control of the chaos…before the entire resort is leveled!”
There’s only one word for this premise: GENIUS.
Unfortunately, if there’s any sort of Giant Spiders Union, then I’d recommend that a designated representative from the organization hightail it over to Sony to protest the God-awful acting in “Ice Spiders.” While I realize that you come to expect a certain level of badness in any Sci-Fi Channel original film, it’s so bad here that, for the first 40 minutes of the movie, I was convinced that there hadn’t been such a waste of giant spiders in a feature-length film since…well, truth be told, I think you’d have to go all the way back to the 1975 Alan Hale, Jr. vehicle, “The Giant Spider Invasion.” (If you’ve never seen it, surf immediately over to the online store of your choice and place an order for “The ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ Collection, Volume 10” right this minute.)
I was never a “Melrose Place” devotee, but I’m led to understand that it’s a vaguely big deal that “Ice Spiders” manages to reunite three of the series’ stars: Thomas Calabro (Dr. Michael Mancini), Patrick Muldoon (Richard Hart), and Vanessa Williams (Rhonda Blair). Calabro does well enough as the leader of the commando unit that’s trying to stop the spiders, but Williams is completely out of her element as a geneticist, and Muldoon turns in such an absolutely awful performance as a former championship skier that you can’t even believe that he’s a professional actor.
Giant spiders and “Melrose Place” fans won’t be the only ones let down by this film. Anyone who spots the DreadCentral.com blurb on the front cover of the DVD and thinks to themselves, “Wow, I didn’t even know I wanted to see a see a film that’s a cross between ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ and ‘Hot Dog: The Movie,’ but now I realize that my life won’t be complete until I do,” should get ready for profound disappointment. This is in no way a comedy. Like 99% of all Sci-Fi Channel original movies, “Ice Spiders” takes itself way more seriously than its budget or performances can stand. It’s a movie about giant spiders, people. There’s only one person in the film who seems to know how to treat the material, and that’s David Millbern, who plays the role of a not-evil-just-misguided scientist like he’s doing a Will Arnett impression, and his delivery is right on the money.
To be fair, the skittering of the obviously-CGI spiders makes for fun viewing, and when our eight-legged friends have the run of the film, you remember that, yes, there was once potential for this movie. Okay, so a film directed by the man who brought you “Mansquito” and “Killer Rats” was never going to be as good as the premise of “Ice Spiders” deserved.
But, dammit, I had such hopes…
By the way, in lieu of a trailer, here’s a clip from the TV Guide Channel where they do an Action Figure Reenactment of a scene from the film. It’s more entertaining than the film itself, but mostly because they repeatedly display that they don’t know a single thing about the movie by inaccurately referring to Vanessa Williams as being the former Miss America and the co-star of “Ugly Betty” when, in fact, it’s the other Vanessa Williams who’s in this:
