Sony Pictures Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Louis Fowler
When you're "rippin' white curls" while "skiffin' the frosty nosh" on your "bitchin' snowboard", your biggest obstacle, besides puking up all that "totally extreme" Mountain Dew, is looking out for trees. As us "hot-shot hot-doggers" know, it's a time consuming task to concentrate on, especially when "chowin' down" on a rather "gnarr gnarr" Power Bar. Hang ten, brah.
But what if at the top of the "powder hill", a group of army scientists are working on a new biological weapon: giant spiders that can withstand freezing temps? Ice spiders, if you will. When those things escape, you can bet your Juicy Fruit that it's going to be "moe-moe bogus" when you go crashing "Sonny Bono-style" into a tree trying to outrun the eight-legged arachnid snow beasts.
Or at least this is what the SyFy Channel masterpiece, ICE SPIDERS would wonderfully lead you to believe.
Even though it's supposedly the dead of winter and a massive snowstorm is headed their way, the denizens of a posh ski resort are enjoying the ice-melting sunshine while being trained by the poor man's Casper Van Dien, former MELROSE PLACE hottie Patrick Muldoon as the irascible Dash. He's a "tubular dude" who could have been an Olympic contender had he not blown out his knee. So in between giving stern lectures to honeymooning couples who don't take skiing seriously and flirting with the local biological researcher, played by MELROSE PLACE hottie Vanessa Williams (no, not her, the other one, you know, the blacker one), he has to contend with a group of young hotshots giving him grief, as well as dealing with the resort's owner, played by the paper-tossing Stephen J. Cannell (yes, that guy who created shows like RIPTIDE, THE A-TEAM and HUNTER, here obviously trying to get into an acting career).
So while all this extreme winter extremeness is going on, up the mountain, at the secret government research lab, a group of giant CGI-spiders, who, if you can believe this, are not affected by cold weather, escape and are being hunted down by an elite task force led by, ahem, MELROSE PLACE hottie Thomas Calabro. These spiders are cunning, poisonous and love basking their 1's and 0's in the warm sun as they encase a whole bus in webbing while waiting for the dumb teens to come out and get their precious bodily fluids sucked dry. Because that's what spiders do. Especially genetically-enhanced ice spiders.
I probably am not giving anything away but *SPOILER ALERT*, Patrick Muldoon overcomes his skiing accident to take down the spiders in the most Mountain Dew way possible, made even more exciting with the use of flares and a pounding synth score. (And while the actor Patrick Muldoon doesn't overcome his bad, probably drunken acting style, the end credits do feature him and his metal-ish band The Sleeping Masses singing something called "Get Off". It totally rocks your balls hardcore.)
Oh yeah – you'll never hear the line "Nice rack!" ever delivered better than the way Mr. Muldoon can.
Director Tibor Takacs, who once had a promising career with films like THE GATE and, um, THE GATE II, has apparently given up all hope on a real film career, and thank God. With his previous Sci-Fi film, MANSQUITO, this film and MEGA SNAKE, Takacs is the go-to guy for giant genetically-enhanced pests that tearto shreds communities made up of a handful of badly-developed characters, which, if you're a regular watcher of SyFy Channel movies like I am, know is quite the massive feat indeed.
Suffice to say ICE SPIDERS is the best movie you well ever see about, well, ice spiders. So pop a "chill pill", grab a couple of "spazzy kookoo" bottles of "Bawls", "soap up" your "ice cold whammy-stick" and commence to "drop poppin'" this "digital video disc" for some "dudical" thrills. Hang loose and pass the Raid.
