Harbinger Down

OK Not the worst movies i've ever seen, but it's by no means going to be remembered for anything special. Lance is about the only thing that holds it together, good actor, underused in my opinion, but even he struggles in the last third to hold the film together. The acting from some, is, shall we say, tired and formulaic, there are flashes from a few, but that's the thing, it's just flashes of what could have been.

So far as the story went, it was very much a "the thing" meets "Alien" meets fishermen..... A promising idea and a good story could have been told, but alas, they fall into the traps they so desperately needed to avoid for comparisons to other more polished bigger budget franchises. A bit more attention to the less is more camp, for achieving a scare where you don't have a big enough budget, would have done more for the poor poor effects and this coupled with poor acting in parts, leaves the film sagging in places where it could have been sailing high.

As i said, not the worst, but by no means the movie it could have been. i gave it a middle of the road meh! rating

Ranks somewhere between self-consciously cheesy SyFy Channel fare and better-than-average direct-to-video product. I think the reason for the films to be located at the Pole's is mainly for the story arc of a 'Time capsule'so to speak' . So the Biological hazards may frozen in time so Hollywood can make scene play Sci-Fi horror film for the masses

This is a very uneven movie.

On the one hand, it's not bad for an independent movie with a tiny budget. The settings is pretty nice and the actors are OK.

The movie is an obvious reference to "The Thing" and it uses practical effects and no CGI. And here lies the first problem: The effects aren't impressive. From a company that deals with practical effects, which has some veteran effects guys and lots of experience, I expected more. A lot more. The effects here only show how amazing Rob Bottin's work was over 30 years ago. I also expected the effects to be a lot more explicit, yet I always got the feeling they try to hide them by shaking the camera, cutting, putting something in front, etc.

The last problem has to do with direction: It's pretty obvious that this is the work of a first time director/writer - The movie is very uneven, there are good scenes and bad scenes, there are continuity problems, coverage problems, editing problems, things that simply don't connect and hard to understand what the director meant to do and also many scenes that seem to be missing a dialog.

All in all, this is a so-so movie for something independent without a budget. I expected more and I'm a bit disappointed, but I'd still think it's worth a watch, at least for the effort.

The Harbinger is a crab fishing ship sailing in the Bering sea. The captain is Bill Graff (ever reliable Lance Henriksen), and on board are students looking to study the effects of climate change on the lives of beluga whales. One of the students is Bills' own granddaughter, Sadie (Camille Balsamo). Soon they discover something interesting inside an ice floe: the long missing remains of a Soviet space capsule, a perfectly preserved cosmonaut...and something else, a malevolent life form that can change forms and liquify at will. Trapped on this ship with nowhere to go, Bill, Sadie, and others realize that they all could have been infected by this thing.

"Harbinger Down" was made by veteran makeup and creature effects creators Alec Gillis (making his writing / directing debut) and Tom Woodruff Jr. as a response to seeing all their hard work for the prequel to John Carpenters' "The Thing" replaced with CGI. That frustration is understandable, but the result is a pretty routine genre entry. Gillis's script is under developed and populated with lame characters, especially the idiotic, jealous professor played by Matt Winston (son of the late, great effects maestro Stan Winston). The character stuff in this movie, in general, is of the eye rolling variety, and Gillis fares a little better with the technical aspects of filmmaking.

He's able to generate some decent suspense, and the atmosphere is pretty impressive for the budget. Obviously, this was made as a direct tribute to "The Thing" (it even begins on June 25, 1982, the date that Carpenters' classic debuted in theatres), and it can't quite exploit the element of paranoia that the earlier film did so well. Some fans may appreciate that it's a quickly paced story that runs a mere 82 minutes, but others will likely wish that it had been fleshed out more.

As a showcase for creature effects that were *supposedly* 100% practical, it does a passable job, but the effects are often under lit, and none of them are really going to blow the audience away.

Chalk this one up as a well intentioned miss.

Five out of 10.

It's hard to bash bad indie movies generally and Harbinger Down is no exception. So I'll try to keep this short and more critically factual.

This movie was kick-started by The Thing (2011) prequel's SFX leftovers that didn't pan out in the final cut of the movie so this thing got birthed on the actual Kickstarter. Inspired by the above mentioned - The Thing, and a bit of Alien, Harbinger Down storyline follows a group of people that for various reasons end up aboard the Harbinger - crab boat. After a short while, they stumble onto something frozen in ice, shenanigans ensue.

It's almost a classic-legacy horror/scifi setup these days, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Here it doesn't and the reasons why that is are numerous. I'll mention just a few of those reasons.

Right of the bat, the movie logo itself contains suspiciously similar fonts to ALIEN (HARBINGER part) and PREDATOR (DOWN part). Not a good sign.

Then there are POV found footage moments that are just random and makes you wonder why's this here? And the rest of the photography is similarly bad. Weird, too close and generally bad camera angles don't make this a pleasant viewing at all.

Characters are blank and the acting is bad most of the time. Lance Henriksen being the exception, everyone else was just not good. Leading lady was boring with some forgettable flat performances. The token white guy with beard and the token black guy were also bad as was the Russian lady.

Ah, the Russian lady. She had some truly brilliant script pieces in this. Moments like "Do you make-up, sis?", or something like that, were the moments where you question yourself why are you watching this in the first place? Also the thing that she looks kinda botoxed and nip-tucked with some super-fake contact lenses and you can see that she is actually wearing some makeup, makes this particular question even more stupid.

So, the story is bleh, script is dumb, acting is the same, are the effects any good? No. I mean, they sold this movie most on that part - the practical special effects, but they are wildly uneven and mostly cheap. Which is kinda the most disappointing, because there are some SFX veteran names in this movie.

If this movie was shot (way) better with better SFX, bad acting and dumb story would be forgiven. But it wasn't and it lacks in almost all the major parts that make a movie. Script is dumb, acting is not that good, story is recycled billion times by now, effects are not that good and as a bonus there are some just cringe, face-palm inducing moments.

It's watchable, but I see no reason why you should do that. Maybe for Lance, but he just sorta breezed through this and didn't make this movie that much better by appearing in it.