Meet Mr. Karma

First things first – Thirst is a lousy name for this movie. It’s a pretty bad one for almost any movie at this point, considering how many times it’s been used in the last 40 years as a film title. On almost every occasion, the movie in question has been about vampires. That’s not the case here. This Thirst is about an alien that arrives on earth hungry. Yeah, apparently Hunger as a title might have given too much away.

And that beautifully illustrates the core problem for this movie – it’s lazy, sloppy work. The inspiration likely came from the mind of a nine-year-old boy who spent his school days drawing fantastical creatures in his spiral notebook and his nights watching Alien, Predator, and Terminator movies. The monster in Thirst is a B movie classic – with a lizard body, an alien mandible, predator dental work, a terminator metal skeleton, and an anus in the middle of its chest. Nice work, kid.

Unfortunately, that same nine-year-old apparently wrote the screenplay. How else to explain that the character among the group of eight wandering the Utah backcountry who is given the most backstory is among the first killed? Or that no proper motivation can be given for the group going further away from civilization after a dead body is found? Or that the most annoying among the many annoying characters sticks around until almost the end?

The alien’s dining options, outside of the good old boy who steps out of his pick up to take a leak and ends up as an entree, is limited to a group of eight hikers who are part of a scared straight program for wayward teens of wealthy parents. Nothing says, “I care,” like arranging for your child to be kidnapped and air dropped into the wilderness, then hunted down like the little beasts that they are. The adult supervision is provided by Claire (Jes Macallan) and Burt (Karl Makinen). The headliners among the teens, at least in attractiveness and longevity, are Roth (John Redlinger) and Courtney (Clare Niederpruem).

On the way to finding better versions of themselves, our band of intrepid delinquents runs into one bad mother of an alien (literally a bad mother – she leaves her alien kid behind in a cave all the time).  Who will survive is the question? Too damn many of them is the answer. Director Greg Kiefer would have been wiser to hew to the template of such horror/science fiction and to dispatch all extraneous members until there is only the Final Girl. No such luck. The alien can take down helicopters and speeding trucks, but is stymied by a teen on an ATV.

Thirst could have been good cheesy fun with a bit more attention to detail. There are a couple of good death throes, and who doesn’t like a pipe bomb shoved in a chest anus? Unfortunately, such moments are too sparse to keep the nine-year-old in all of us from growing restless.