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WHITEOUT

Indeed.

As it is, this adaptation of the Greg Rucka graphic novel squeaked into the No. 100 spot in the 100 worst reviewed movies as compiled by Rotten Tomatoes, the website that tabulates the critical reaction to a given film.

That's surprising. It's not as bad as that other shot-in-Manitoba travesty, New in Town, which scored a comparatively generous 17 on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. (Whiteout scored 7 out of 100.)

But it is a botched adaptation nonetheless, starting with the miscasting of the glamorous Kate Beckinsale as the book's comparatively butch U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko. Beckinsale is more glamorous as the bodice-clad vamp of the Underworld movies. Alas, glamour tends to be the first casualty in a place where icicles hang from one's nostrils, as any Winnipegger could tell you.

Investigating the first murder on the Antarctic, Stetko hits a series of icy brick walls, even with the assistance of UN investigator Robert Pryce (Gabriel Macht) and the wily Antarctic veteran Doc Fury (Tom Skeritt).

The mystery at the core of the film is sufficiently compelling, but Sena doesn't serve it well, succumbing to a kind of frostbite of the imagination. For example, what should have been a riveting climactic sequence -- in which Stetko attempts to evade the killer while the two negotiate their way across storm lines to prevent being blown away in a ferocious gale -- merely comes off as a confusing spectacle of parkas mucking about in a field of white.

That scene was shot inside a Montreal studio, a fact revealed on the Blu-ray doc The Coldest Thriller Ever Made, which documents most of the Lake Manitoba shoot, and its attendant difficulty for the actors accustomed to more tropical climes. 2-1/2 stars

KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

William Shatner is at his Shatner-iest -- macho, swaggering, emphatically emotional -- in this low budget Jaws knock-off from 1977 that substitutes tarantulas for killer sharks.

The Shat plays a small-town veterinarian called in to investigate a mysterious death. Instead of a nubile nude swimmer, the first victim is a calf. The spider POV shots -- tracking towards young bossie -- are nothing short of hilarious, albeit unintentionally so.

When the nubile bovine tests positive for spider venom, more Jaws parallels emerge: An entomologist is called in to assist ('70s drive-in movie queen Tiffany Bolling is prettier than Richard Dreyfuss). The mayor is worried about how the spider plague will put a kibosh on a planned county fair, etc.

In a recent interview on the DVD extras, Shatner is characteristically diplomatic in his memories of casting women in the film: "...Couldn't act, ugly, short little dumpy legs... but (if you could) touch a tarantula, you're in." At least his memories of working with arachnids is pretty amusing, as is the footage of his evasive manoeuvring over spider-covered ground. If you're looking for a movie to mock, this is choice stuff.

Betcha didn't know: One of the editors of this film is future Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List). 3 stars

CAIRO TIME

Prior to this, writer-director Ruba Nadda's last feature film was the sweet and sensual Sabah, about a 40-year-old single Arab woman (played by Arsinee Khanjian) finding forbidden love with a Canadian hoser in deepest Toronto. Nadda inverts that dynamic in Cairo Time. This time, it's a WASPish Canadian named Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) who finds herself in the alien Muslim world of Egypt.

Juliette is married, apparently happily, to Mark (Tom McCamus), a UN bureaucrat who is delayed doing sensitive work in Gaza. They vowed to see the pyramids together. But when Mark fails to show (and she can't even get angry about it because he's doing essential humanitarian work), his urbane friend Tareq (Sudan-born Alexander Siddig) steps in to act as guide.

Where the city (like any city) can be strange and even menacing, Tareq shows her a side to Cairo that is warm and inviting; qualities Juliette eventually ascribes to Tareq himself. Juliette initially suggests Tareq is destined to hook up with a lost love he meets while picking up Juliette at the airport. But she clearly entertains the notion of a hook-up that might be more personally fulfilling.

Pyramids are all very well, but it is Clarkson who takes our breath away with a wholly mature performance suggesting a passion that is no less inclined to smoke, just because it's on the back burner. 3 stars

ALIEN TRESPASS

The '50s sci-fi movie was such a singular genre, it is still subject to affectionate feature-length parodies, including John Paizs's Top of the Food Chain (1999), The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) and last year's Monsters Vs. Aliens. That's not even counting the shorter parodies such as the marauding breast in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex ("Its about a 4,000 with an X cup.") and the titular sketch of Amazon Women on the Moon.

Now comes this comic direct-to-DVD monster movie, passed off as a "lost" film from 1957.

Play the DVD "with introduction" and you'll hear how the film's long-dead producer burned the prints and negative of the film after a dispute with its star "Merrick McCormack" (the supposed grandfather of the movie's actual star Eric McCormack; In this bit and elsewhere in the DVD extras, Eric is funnier playing himself than he is in the entirety of the movie.)

In the small town of Mojave, a fiery meteoroid crashes to earth, perking the interest of McCormack's unflappable, pipe-smoking astronomer Ted Lewis. When he investigates, his body is taken over by an alien space marshall named Urp (Think about it) who must track down a one-eyed, man-eating tentacle creature called an "Ghota." The only person who believes Ted, it turns out, is the plucky waitress Tammi (charming Aussie actress Jenni Baird) who, not coincidentally, carries a torch for the happily married Ted.

Evidently, director R.W. Goodwin harbours such love for the It Came from Outer Space genre, he is more inclined to lovingly recreate it rather than mock it outright.

Not that I have a problem with that. Alien Trespass is a movie about an alien that reduces humans to a puddle of goo, and yet is still fun for the whole family. 3 stars

PANDORUM

In space, no one can hear you kvetch about the editing...

That's the upshot of this space opera set on an interplanetary ark on which the young astronaut Bower (Ben Foster) awakens in a hyper-sleep chamber to make his way through the apparently abandoned vessel. Attempting to piece together the fate of the ship, Bower, working as the eyes and ears of his commander Lieut. Payton (Dennis Quaid), discovers a feral warrior woman named Nadia (Antje Traue) on board. More distressing is a population of fish belly-white cannibal mutants.

The script by Travis Milloy has great potential as a solid science-fiction tale, but director Christian Alvart too closely follows the example of Paul W.S. Anderson (the director of Resident Evil and one of the producers of Pandorum) and slavishly duplicates that director's penchant for outsize stunts, soundtrack overload and especially lightning-quick editing that renders the action all but incomprehensible.

The DVD box tells you Pandorum comes from the "creators of the Resident Evil films." But they don't tell you that's not necessarily a good thing. 2 stars

Top 10 DVD Rentals 

1. The Hurt Locker

2. World's Greatest Dad

3. District 9

4. A Perfect Getaway

5. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

6. Inglourious Basterds

7. All About Steve

8. The Hangover

9. Fame

10. Halloween II

-- Rogers Video, week ending Jan. 17

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 21, 2010 E4