Thirst (2016)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

.. but it wasn't. It was awful. Sucky CGI ruined it. Seriously, you can't make a movie nowadays with that kind of CGI. Go for puppets instead, it will look better.

THIRST is an all-too-familiar low budget enterprise shot in the Utah desert. A group of kids are on their way to a tough boot camp, but instead they come across a meteorite site which has brought with it a CGI alien that appears to be a mixture of different creatures. Mucho low-rent action then takes place as the kids are bumped off one by one by the beast while they attempt to figure out a way to kill it. Aside from a small role for THE WALKING DEAD's Karl Makinen, who is reliably good, this is pretty poor, with unoriginal plotting and uninteresting special effects. Films like this only really work when they're bursting with suspense and you won't find much of that here.

Thirst started out kind of fun. By the 30 minute mark we had a nicely established cast of characters (if a little cookie cutter), in a plausible wilderness scenario and I was enjoying myself ready for them to get picked off one by one by the creature.The creature itself was satisfying enough. The sfx, while not great, were passable, and the centaur/biomechanical alien design was unique. They showed it a bit too much imo, when they could have hidden some of the dodgier cgi moments with cleverer direction, but overall the beast was well done.Unless I'm very much mistaken, the director and writer were going for a fun, 80s style horror in the vein of Tremors or The Blob remake. Props for that, because in these days of convoluted plots, a simple people vs monster story is always welcome. However, after the first act, the film falls apart quickly. The characters become increasingly unlikeable as the movie progresses due to really dumb choices and forced bickering. The director makes the poor decision of killing off the most likable and interesting character first, and so the one guy who might have carried the movie is quickly lost. Thirst also suffers from the same problem many indies face - ill fitting music. The score might be fine as a standalone composition but it really just doesn't fit with what's going on on screen. It's tension building when it should be exciting, exciting when it should be tension building, ominous when it should be sad... it's almost like the composer was flying blind and trying to score without actually seeing the film. This along with some lackluster directing really kills any sense of fun, atmosphere or excitement that the movie could have had. Shame, because I usually love these kinds of films. 4/10

It's early evening out in the desert. A hayseed is driving along in his pickup drinking a beer and listening to country-western. Within moments, in the course of a single song, it's the dead of night. Since all the characters in this movie are cookie-cutter, two- dimensional and stereotypical, and this particular cookie-cutter is the hayseed-truck-driving-beer-drinking-country-western-listening- cookie-cutter, he must do what cookie-cutter stereotypes do. In other words, he must go unload that beer whilst fully illuminated in the high beams of his own truck. And we get to watch. You can already tell this is going to be a winner.Suddenly the electricals in his truck start to act up. For the rest of the picture we know that this means the space alien/monster is close by. In this movie, this is what passes for foreshadowing.For no apparent reason, an orb-shaped whatsit crashes in the desert not far from a down-on-its-luck retreat for wayward boys and girls. Nosy hayseed pokes around the impact site too much sees an egg-like object in the open sphere and promptly has himself sucked dry of all of his innards by a space alien/monster. Takes less time than it's taken me to describe it.The alien/monster is overtly biomechanical with a very heavy emphasis on the mechanical part. About the only part that seems to still be biological is the proboscis/sucker that pops out of his chest to suck out your insides.Structurally, the alien/monster looks like a love child between a T1000, a centaur, and Johnny Bravo. Everything is so heavily biased towards the front with 4 little short legs that, physics being honored, it would spend all of its time keeled over on its face. But it can outrun a truck. Uh huh.The only potential reason for its presence, tentatively and halfheartedly put forward by one of the kids whose primary purpose is to be menu items, is that it is here as part of an initial salting operation.At one point in the movie there's a person glued to a cave wall with a baby monster stuck on its chest winding up for dinner. Thank you all the Alien movies.To emphasize how tough the alien/monster is, it rather effortlessly survives a full-size helicopter ride smack into a vertical granite wall 200 feet up with subsequent explosion and freefall to the desert floor. And some more fire. And it just comes out with kind of a sunburn.It finally gets taken out with a pipe bomb. Lucky for us it had that T1000 father. And apparently teenager reprobates make the best ordinance.Really, this movie is formulaic from front to back. You could substitute any given teenage slasher character for the alien/monster and not miss a step. Unexplained, apparently indestructible antagonist kills (and optionally eats) teenage victims one by one until Hero Teenager, Love Interest and Plucky Nerd are all that's left. Then they do that One Magical Thing that stops the antagonist. The End.What really kills this movie is the monster design and bottom-of- the-barrel story. The CGI is actually pretty good for a low-budget film. The acting is adequate and middle-of-the-road with two notable exceptions. The Only Looking out for Myself teenager character does some of the worst acting I've ever seen (but at least he doesn't See the Light just prior to dying). The Teenage Hero character, on the other hand, is actually quite good.Good writing can almost save anything. Bad writing can kill anything for sure.