The Colony

Click to expand, if you dare!

We stopped by the #1Zoo for a gathering of Dear's work, and it was pretty cool. Lincoln and I got up close to see the giant polar bear trying to catch fish in its little pond. My goodness, that thing was massive! Its paws were the size of my head. Bears are such cool animals, I love them. It's too bad there's a poopy team in Chicago that named itself after such a cool animal, while the team is about as lame as can be. Oh well, at least we can talk about...

The Colony (2013)

Two Canadian horror movies in a row? I'm as surprised as you are. This is by pure chance, too. Both movies had me scrolling through Prime and then Tubi, waiting for something to catch my eye. Thankfully, both this and Cube had interesting enough blurbs and pictures to warrant watching.

So we open up to a snowy wasteland in 2045. The world has been covered in a state of perpetual deep, deep snow. It's been snowing for a long time, and the surviving members of humanity are hunkered down in underground bunkers. It is similar to George Romero's underrated Day of the Dead, but instead of zombies, think a shit ton of snow.

Humans built climate-modification towers to combat climate change, but those towers accidentally caused a new ice age. It's been like this for an extended, but unspecified, period of time, and the people in the bunker aren't faring well. They're low on food and medicine, and after the flu swept through and killed a bunch of them, they now have a strict protocol when someone gets sick. They get quarantined for days, and then if they still don't get better, they get a choice: a quick death by rifle or to "take a walk." Basically, turn around and walk the other way until you're dead. We start with such a scene where Bill Paxton is clearly overwhelmed by the state of everything. He doesn't give the sick person the option of taking the walk; he just up and shoots him. Paxton tells the protagonist, Sam, that it's nothing personal; the guy would have come back, and they can't risk another outbreak. After that, he casually heads back inside.

Once inside, we meet the rest of the main players, including the leader, Briggs, played by Laurence Fishburne. He and Paxton served together in the military, and each is getting tired of the other and plans to make changes. But that's put on hold when they get an emergency broadcast from a nearby bunker and decide to go investigate.

Once they get to the other bunker, they find a trail of blood in the snow, and now I'm getting The Thing vibes as they navigate through the empty and blood-soaked corridors. Sam picks a lock, and they come across Death from Supernatural! What are the odds? Back-to-back Julian Richings sightings! Anyways, he locked himself in to escape the massacre, and he's refusing to come out. He would much rather face an inevitable and slow death than deal with whatever killed his friends. But before he locks himself away again, he shows the group a dispatch they found of another colony that managed to get one of the weather systems to work, and they're living in a thawed-out, sunny and fertile community. The only problem is, they don't have any seeds to grow their crops, something our group of heroes has a good amount of!

After getting the coordinates, they made the mistake of doing a little investigating and found out that the entire colony was butchered by a group of cannibals who are absolutely delighted by the fresh meat that just sauntered in. After a fight, our heroes try to make it back while the cannibals follow close behind.

I think more horror movies should be set in a snowy terrain. Here's why it's scary: there's no hope of losing your pursuer by running. At some point, you have to stand and fight. No matter how far you go or how fast you run, they can just follow your footsteps at their leisure while you wear yourself out running in the snow. That's exactly how the baddies in this one work. They seemingly wander the area; the movie doesn't say if they have a base of operations or how they manage to survive in the cold, but when they come across someone, they just follow them wherever they're holding up. It's terrifying to think about the slow inevitability that something is coming for you, and there's nowhere for you to run. Although at one point in this movie, I don't buy for a second that they could have followed Sam the way that they did. But we need to reach the climax somehow.

The movie uses its setting effectively, from the weather, the bunkers and the look of the survivors, it feels like they're on their last legs. You can understand why everyone, including the baddies, is the way they are for the most part. The baddies are a slight exception because they're barely human and act like feral dogs more than anything, but you can understand why they'd resort to eating people, but not to the extent the movie takes them. There's only one instance where one speaks, and it's just a one-word yell. The others are a mix of growls, screams and grunts. I can see becoming a pack of murdering human-eaters, but I don't see them all forgetting how to speak. The movie is set well after the new ice age, but it doesn't seem THAT long ago.

I thought Bill Paxton's Mason was a little too over-the-top, like his fixation on murdering Sam got a little silly, but it's Bill Paxton! Knowing the actor, I was a little disappointed they didn't let him go for it. Normally, I'd complain if a character is too evil for the sake of being evil, but Paxton is so much fun when he's a cartoon character. The movie starts with him being at his breaking point, so why not let him go for it? While showing the crew making their trek through the snow, they should have cut back to the Colony and delved into the damage he could do in the short amount of time they were gone.

Still, it's enjoyable, but doesn't really stand out. It seems like a mashup of several movies I've already seen, and movies that did what this one did were better. It has a strong cast, Laurence Fishburne is used perfectly, but like I mentioned earlier, they could have done more with Paxton. As for our hero, Sam, there's nothing too interesting about him. He's the idealist hero we've seen, and while he's the protagonist, he seems to get overshadowed by Briggs and Mason whenever either is on screen. Still, the actor does a good job and holds up as well as he could against two giants.

The action was pretty good, if a little hectic. Some characters got cool deaths, and even Mason finds a small sliver of redemption, even if a second before his propensity for murder nearly gets the better of him in a funny way. The final fight scene plays a little too Hollywood for me, a big dude manhandles a smaller dude, and instead of killing them, throws them into some walls. I get it looks cool to see someone go crashing through stuff, but I saw a video that pointed out how often that happens, and now I can't unsee it. Still, it redeems itself because the main baddie gets an absolutely gnarly death.

Solid, but not spectacular!

7 Dr. Chainsaws!