Have you ever let the curiosity get the best of you? Playing my favorite game of “what horror film looks the worst on Blockbuster’s new release wall,” I happened upon Ice Spiders, and the cover alone made me burst into hysterics. Giant spiders on an ice covered mountain with skiers fleeing in terror. How could I not want to see it, but had I read the back of the packaging, I would have seen a few key words that would have allowed me to realize that at one point, this phrase was associated with the movie:

A made of Sci-Fi original picture.

I think by now you know exactly how we feel here about those.

Ice Spiders is yet another shinning example of the horror that Sci-Fi can unleash upon the unsuspecting, and I don’t mean that in a good way either. While there are good B movies, Ice Spiders doesn’t even fit into that category at all. The plot revolves around a ski resort in the mountains of Utah where they just happens to be a laboratory in close proximity, because we all know that when you’re conducting top secret, government funded experiments, being as close to the population as you feasibly can be works best. Dash Dashiell (Patrick Muldoon), a washed up Olympic skier has come to the lodge to work as an instructor, unaware of the horror that awaits him. Giant spiders have escaped from the neighboring lab and are now turning their attentions to humans as a source of food. Dr. April Sommers (Vanessa Williams) is trying to round up their experiments while a special ops unit who were obviously trained by Imperial Stormtroopers are trying to round the creatures up as well, but the blood thirsty spiders are craftier than expected and the body count begins to mount.

I’m convinced that Sci-Fi uses most of their available funding to produce television series first because it seems that none of them have managed to get snubbed that bad by critics. With what’s left, they turn to schlock like this, and if could be for one reason only; tax write-off. I would be rather difficult for me to complete this sentence, “The worst Sci-Fi original picture I’ve seen is . . . “ because there have been so many of them, and they seriously seem to be getting worse.

Based just on the cover, you’ll either find yourself laughing like I did, or think that this might be a really cool horror film. There’s a giant spider after all that looks to be three or four stories tall, but that’s not what the movie has. The spiders are badly done computer animation, much like something that you’d find in a bargain rack video game, and the spiders are only distinguished by the difference in color, outside of that the spiders use the same animations over and over again.

Where did the spiders come from you might wonder? Well, as the case usually is, a government funded project started working on splicing spiders with the DNA of their prehistoric ancestors in hopes of being able to harvest their silk The silk of course they plan on utilizing for defensive capabilities including the creation of body armor, but someone involved with the project thought it would be a fantastic idea to increase the speed of growth and now the starving spiders have gotten lose. Oh, the idea of escaped genetic experiments gone wild has never been done before, and you won’t believe what happens when we give these spiders our cameras and . . . . wait, wrong advert.

It couldn’t possibly get any worse, right? That’s where you’re wrong. Ice Spiders has some extremely bad, surfer influenced dialog from two characters. The only thing that’s missing is the over usage of the term “extreme”, but I guess the screenwriter hadn’t thought of that. If cliché, god-awful, horrendous, and utterly lame were rolled all into one package, the result would be Ice Spiders . . . and it is. There are times when no matter who poor a script may be, you can at least get some actors behind the product to carry it along, but this just isn’t one of those times. The acting, the CG spiders, some poorly executed “gore” and you have everything you need for a movie that probably was better on network television simply because the commercial breaks at least gave you some better cinematography.

Bonus features? What are those? Oh, I know what they are, but they aren’t included on this DVD release. No behind the scenes so we can see the creation of the spiders? That’s certainly disappointing, or maybe not.

Some people think that a bad movie can be a good time, but Ice Spiders isn’t one of those times. I know I’ve always wanted a movie that featured skiing and spiders together in one movie, or maybe I didn’t, but either way, Ice Spiders is just another example of Sci-Fi presenting poorly crafted, filmed, and thought out movies. If their “original” pictures aren’t bad enough, there are always the sequels to existing movies. What next, a sequel to Lake Placid released on DVD?

-mike-