Thirst

This disaster movie is not like other disaster movies. Other disaster movies tend to follow a very rigid structure and not stray from it.

First we meet the primary characters and we get to know them through scenes of "everyday life".

Then the secondary characters whose "lives will be changed forever" are introduced.

Lastly the "enemy" is introduced. Mostly in the form of the mighty bureaucrat who won't evacuate the city or close the beaches or whatever.

This movie introduces one secondary character and uses tertiary characters for all the "unwashed masses" who are just supposed to die anyway. This enables the movie to concentrate on the efforts of the hero(es) to fix the situation and not have to show a lot of pointless drivel about dogs trapped in rain pipes and children being caught under buses.

Plus, the characters are actually well drawn and the story is somewhat believable.

I was entertained for an hour and a half and that's really the point, right?

Thirst seemed to be just another disaster movie. Our hero of the story, knowing the extreme danger and threat to the welfare of his family, should have gotten them out of town before the quarantine. The plant manager was incompetent as far as politics are concerned. Why didn't he know where the $15,000,000 went? The mayor was the biggest joke of the entire movie. A liar, a swindler, a finger pointer from the beginning. Sounds like another true politician to me. He should have been run out of town on a rail.

THIRST is probably the most boring movie called THIRST. It's a wannabe-environmental disaster movie that would like to be thought of in the same breath as OUTBREAK, except as a small-budgeted TV movie it's lacking in every respect and just doesn't pass muster as a thriller.

The major problem with this film is that it's so boring! A plot about an outbreak of deadly bacteria in a small town's water supply has the potential for much incident and high drama, but instead the writers (and there are too many of them) strive to make this as mundane as possible. Scenes of people dying from poisoned water are filmed in such a hokey way that I was laughing at them, as cruel as that sounds.

The acting is routine and the characters even more routine, and have seemingly been picked out of a box of stereotypes. There's the heroic engineer character, who wouldn't you know it is a loving family man on the side; his glamorous wife, who happens to be a crusading doctor on the side; the evil mayor, who ignores warnings and does all in his power to cover everything up. And so it goes on.

There's barely no drama, no characters to like or care about, nothing that hasn't been paraded out a zillion times already. In fact, there's no reason to like THIRST, as even by the shoddy standards of made-for-TV disaster movies it's a real timewaster.

I saw a movie more than ten years ago about people in a town somewhere in Southern California getting sick and dying from drinking water that has been contaminated with parasites! The scientist and engineers thought they got the problem solved by replacing the filtration system and there was still parasites getting through the water filtration system! Then they stumbled upon the idea to come up killing the parasites and purifying the water by making a using a powerful ozone generator. I wonder if this is the movie i saw years ago(?) I only saw the movie once. I clearly remember the movie ends where they used the ozone generator and the water came out clear of parasites! Is this the movie??

Thirst

A chemical engineer struggles to find a way to kill a deadly parasite that has infiltrated a town's water supply.

Let's face it: 'Thirst' is an extremely silly film, and there's a few too many movements in the plot that would have absolutely no chance of occurring in that thing called the real world (a world which I'm sure seems alien to Hollywood at times). But while 'Thirst' is very nearly mediocre, I already feel like I'm raining on the parade of the film, as it's just too hard not to become marginally interested in the mayhem that ensues. 'Thirst' is a very run-of-the-mill production, even for a television movie, but it gets by thanks to its sheer energy. It's a small guilty pleasure, but there's some downright irritating acting from a sizeable portion of the cast here, and this partially bulldozes the arid thrills of 'Thirst'.

~ 6/10 ~