THIRST (2008)
Directed By: Jeffery Scott Lando
Written By: Kurt Volkan and Joel Newman
Starring: Lacey Chabert, Tygh Runyan, and Mercedes McNab (those last two aren’t important because hey….LACEY CHABERT! I’ll explain this in a moment….)
Executive Producer: LACEY CHABERT
Hey hey hey true believers! Ever wonder what would happen if the WWE’s Triple H got to make his own horror movie, written by, produced by, directed by, and starring himself and say, Kofi Kingston, Nattie Neidhart, and Evan Bourne? Wonder no more, as you need look no further than LACEY CHABERT’s star vehicle that she (and some other unimportant hacks) just released called
Thirst to see how that would turn out. LACEY CHABERT is in full on HHH “abuse of power” mode here, to the point where I even wonder why in the blue hell they even had ANYONE else’s name in the credits besides hers. This film goes to such extreme lengths to make sure that you get the point that CHABERT is the star, that I am honestly shocked that my Netflix rental of this didn’t also include a hired goon who sat next to me and screamed “Pay attention to LACEY CHABERT, not those odder mooks!” every time anyone else had ANY screentime with precious LACEY CHABERT. Can’t have anyone stealing scenes from our darling LACEY now can we?
Thirst is ostensibly supposed to a story not unlike that found in Adam Greene’s
Frozen, only instead of three equally balanced characters trapped in the same situation we have two “couples” and instead of a frozen ski lift, we have the blistering Nevada desert. And instead of equal characters we have a bimbo, a dickhead, a STUPID dickhead, and Saint LACEY CHABERT, no doubt canonized by the Pope himself before filming. You think I’m exaggerating? Check this out: the only “couple” in the movie consists of Noelle (LACEY CHABERT) and Bryan (Tygh Runyan) and from the moment we’re introduced to them, one of them is painted in a very unfair, very biased light. I’ll give you one guess as to whom THAT might be. HINT: It’s not Saint LACEY. See, the angelic Noelle (the irony that her character, meant to be the ONLY likable one, or so it was intended is named after Christmas is not lost on me…in fact it only pissed me off further as the movie went along because it felt like someone was mocking me for watching this tripe) is actually pregnant with the couple’s child, and this gives her every excuse in the book to act like a frigid, stuck up, cold hearted BITCH to her husband, and gives her carte blanche to boss, intimidate and bitch at everyone else in the film. But see, the thing is, everyone else is too stupid, meek, or retarded to stand up to her so they let her do it. Plus, she’s totally pregnant, and in med school and stuff, and knows more as a med school STUDENT than some doctors I’ve encountered in hospitals. But I digress.
The unhappy, and sexless (totally HIS fault, not Saint LACEY’s) couple are supposed to be on vacation with Bryan’s best friend Tyson (Brandon Quinn) and Tyson’s “girlfriend” (aka prostitute) Atheria (Mercedes McNab, whose only crime here is being the embodiment of what the average male thinks of as hot: tall, thin, busty and blonde…aka everything CHABERT is probably jealous of in real life, though Lord only knows WHY…LACEY CHABERT is gorgeous herself, as you will no doubt notice if you watch this movie, what with the MANY and TEDIOUS slow motion shots of CHABERT in a pool in a bikini. Can you say “vanity project”? I knew you could!)
And that’s where the HHH analogy comes into play…this movie is so un-goddamn-balanced towards one character that it seems exactly like the kind of movie WWE Films would come up with for Hunter to star in! Hell, you’d have thought those other names I wrote up above, in the “written by” and “directed by” sections were just pen names or pseudonyms that CHABERT used to avoid having this film so readily advertise itself as being “ALL ABOUT ME ME ME ME ME ME ME!" and thus hurt it’s chances of EVER being viewed by anyone other than CHABERT or her immediate friends and family. I don’t know about you, but had I known this was going to be damn near two hours of a tribute to how smart and beautiful and wonderful and kind LACEY CHABERT is, I never….eeeeeeeeeEVER would have watched it. Not that I have anything against Ms. CHABERT…at least, I didn’t before I watched
Thirst. But I digress again.
In the movie, dickhead Bryan and Saint Noelle are drug to the middle of a desert for a photo-shoot with ultra-dumb dickhead Tyson and bimbo Atheria. Of course, because his wife is a
frigid f*****g bitch pregnant and hasn’t put out at ALL in a MONTH, Bryan is having fun spending time in the company of the bubbly, friendly, and smiling Atheria, and relaxing in the company of his friend Tyson. Of course, this hideous error of judgment on his part is soon rectified by the Gods as ultra-stupid dickhead Tyson wrecks their SUV (swerving to avoid hitting a wolf or a coyote…the movie vacillates on this point several times and never clarifies which exact species of wild canine it was…looked like a big f*****g wolf to me) and leaves the group stranded in the desert, almost two hundred miles from civilization, and at the total and utter mercy of Saint Noelle, who is the only character allowed ANY shred of intelligence whatsoever. Oh and for her crime of being hot, sexy and above all else friendly to Bryan,
{Spoiler} Atheria suffers massive brain damage in the accident, and we get to watch as her character succumbs slowly to those injuries. Oh and LACEY CHABERT gets to hammer a f*****g SCREWDRIVER through her skull, and later on will come BACK to Atheria’s corpse and use the saline from Atheria’s big implants to MacGyver an improvised saline drip to save her own life
. If THAT isn’t a huge “F*** YOU” to someone on CHABERT’S personal s*** list, I don’t know what the f*** would be. God DAMN.
So yeah, instead of having three equally scared people in the same situation as Greene did in the WAY better
Frozen, we’re left with three morons and a Saint who literally can do no wrong. This isn’t even CLOSE to a spoiler if you’ve read this far, but can you take a guess as to wHHHo the sole survivor is going to be? HINT: Her name has appeared in all caps all the way through this review just to hammer home the point that this movie was trying to make: only one person in this film really matters. F*** everyone else.
And you know, at the end of the day, that wouldn’t have made me so mad if it WEREN’T so unequal. I understand the concept of a “star vehicle”. You have a bona fide star and you put them in a movie with other expendable characters and in the end, the star walks away the hero. Seen it countless times, and it’s never really bothered me before; hell, I’ve seen it done with lesser stars than CHABERT and it’s never bothered me this much. But even in those cases, the writing wasn’t this one sided towards making one character a living SAINT and literally every other character have to depend on her for survival due to their OWN unbelievable idiocy.
THAT is what made
Thirst so repugnant to me; not that it IS a “star vehicle” but that it’s so blatant and forceful about it. But oddly enough, that blatant force-feeding of
HHH LACEY CHABERT ends up backfiring in a way, making you root for the other characters to survive instead of her, because she’s SUCH an unbelievable “saint” of a character, and she’s so flawless that SHE ends up being the hateable one. By the time the film rolls around to having the GALL to have one character
{Spoiler}sacrifice his OWN life so that Saint LACEY might live
, you just SOOOO want that wolfpack to rip CHABERT’S “know it all Noelle” to shreds that it’s not even funny. The fact that that DOESN’T happen is downright depressing.
In a first for my time here at the Crap, I’m awarding NO STARS to
Thirst, and I’d even say that if you have a choice in the matter, it’s better to be
Frozen than
Thirsty any old day of the week.
TOTAL DUD, recommendation to AVOID.