So we’re back in with another round of Ghost House Underground’s newest releases, and this time we’re tackling The Thaw, which Lions Gate dropped me a copy of.

The carcass of a woolly mammoth is exposed in a polar ice cap, and a team of researchers–okay, more like a bunch of college kids and their ecology professor–heads out to excavate and investigate.  But what they’ll find buried in the ice is a whole lot more than science.  They’ll find a parasite thought long extinct, and the students have only two, equally horrible, options remaining to them:  either establish a quarantine that will kill them all, or set loose a pandemic the likes of which the world has never seen.

I know, sounds freaky, doesn’t it?  And by itself, it definitely is.  The only remaining question, of course, is how well does it WATCH?

Okay, first off?  This sucker’s going to be REALLY heavy handed with its eco-trippy crunchy granola we’re-all-killing-the-planet-by-breathing message.  I mean REALLY heavy handed.  It’s like the new gold standard for smug.  If you hate environmentalism excelsior then this movie will give you hives.

Second, it’s just INCREDIBLY awesome that they got THE Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) from The X-Files involved.  I’m prepared to forgive a whole lot of preaching for that little cameo, and it’s a good thing too, because they will do a LOT of preaching.

Third, global warming is weak sauce science at best, and no one can conclusively prove this isn’t part of a normal cycle so NYEAH.

Anyway, the end result is a movie that’s actually got a few good scares on it, but also couches those scares in a lot of environmentalism nonsense.  It’s hard to be scared when you’re bored, and it’s easy to get bored when you’re being preached at relentlessly by a movie.  They had a wonderfully scary idea–pandemic movies are great fun because they’re often survival horror-based and, let’s face it, anyone can get sick.

There is a pretty good twist ending that’s actually a really nifty surprise, even if it too is heavy handed.

The Screenhead Ten Scale agrees with me that this might have been scarier if it weren’t so ham-fisted about its message, and thus gives it a six out of ten.