Rammbock Director’s The Station Will Mutate Your Interest With Trailer And Stills
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I have to wonder if John Carpenter knew that by making The Thing back in 1982 that the sci-fi/horror genre could never again go into any form of icy depths without drawing immediate and generally negative comparisons. This year has already seen Jeff Renfroe’s ice age thriller The Colony put Lawrence Fishburne and Bill Paxton in the warpath of vicious cannibals, and next year will see Ron Moore’s “killer outbreak in an ice station” thriller Helix hit Syfy. Right in between those we have Marvin Kren’s German WTF horror The Station — or Blood Glacier depending on your translation preferences — which is naturally reminiscent of The Thing due to a monstrous threat lurking around a limited location, but could perhaps be nothing like that film, as The Station‘s trailer makes the film look far more over the top, and isn’t limited to just one mostly unseen beast. There are tons! Plus, it’s in the Alps. It’s completely different.
The basic premise behind the film centers on a team of scientists working at a weather research station while investigating climate change. (Already I’m picturing a twist ending where we find out humans are the real monsters.) Anyway, the team discovers a huge red glacier made up of a mysterious substance that has the capability of turning anything that touches it into mutated freaks. No one is safe as they wait for government officials to arrive and take care of the mess.
So let’s go over the pros and cons of this trailer. First, though dialogue would have been nice to get a sense of these actors’ performances, it’s good that the story can be laid out without a word being said, and it’s a story that is intriguing despite not being the most original. Second, I really like the idea that any living creature that comes into contact with the substance turns into a wacko beast, as it should hypothetically create a lot more tension, and I’m sure there won’t be much subtext to go on, besides the climate stuff. And Kren’s first film, 2010’s pseudo-zombie horror Rammbock, was pretty damned good. (Check out the 63-minute film on Netflix here.)
On the other hand, maybe the dialogue, from a script co-written by Kren and Benjamin Hessler, will be clunky and hard to accept. Maybe the plot will be extremely light and will serve only to justify the special effects. Maybe…meh. I don’t even want to consider this movie being terrible anymore. It’s got enough of a hurdle to climb over just by existing.
U.K. audiences will be able to see The Station when it comes out on DVD this January 20, 2014, but U.S. audiences may have to wait, as there is no official release set for the States yet. To hold your interest a little longer, check out this batch of stills from Bloody Disgusting. There are a lot more on the website, but I just took the ones with blood and guns. Let’s kill some mutants!
