You global warming deniers need to watch this. Don't care about rising sea levels and increased frequency of heavy precipitation events? Well I'll bet you'll care when a giant wood louse with an ibex head comes knockin'. Hope all that hair spray you used in the 80s was worth it. Also a research team is trapped in the Alps by all the mutants you thawed out up there.

First of all avert your eyes America because this is From Austria (not Germany; there's a difference I guess, like how New Zealand is not the same as Australia) and in Northern Europe instead of airbrushing in attractive twentysomethings to fill all the roles they let regular ugly ol' humans act in movies. Some of the performers even appear to be over 40 for god's sake. Like one of the characters is a female high ranking minister of some sort of government environmental protection agency, and while you'd normally expect a role like that to be filled by, say, a pole dancer, we have instead a rather plump older lady who, if you can stand it, actually does stuff and speak lines.

And this guy will be our hero in today's Alpine adventure.

The movie is not without cliché however as sadly even the cold, machinelike Germans I mean Austrians feel the need to wedge in some sort of romantic crisis. Guy can't get over his ex but oh no she just happens to be on the team sent to inspect the remote mountain research facility where he volunteered to work specifically to avoid seeing her. Kind of an insult really, but luckily my German isn't good enough to understand what they're on about and there's no law says I have to read the subtitles. I think they find love again through hardship though, and get a cool dog-baby to raise as their own.

And aside from the inspector lady who you really do not want to piss off or she'll swat that banana right out of your hand, the rest of the team exhibit behaviour fairly stereotypical to this sort of narrative. Along with scruffy hero guy and super tan ex girlfriend chick we have callous science lady who cares more about research data than the safety of mankind, and not one but two abject cowards who turn the opposite of trumps in the end and need to be cuffed around by you-know-who.

Overall though I often found myself not hating this. Mostly formulaic but now and then something just a bit different from what I expected would happen, and some genres are hard to fuck up too awfully badly. It's just neat when research teams are trapped out there and weird shit is going on. And it's got that ibex thing.