Chabert Watch: Thirst (2010)

I need two tubes of Burt's Bees, STAT!

Watched:  05/12/2025

Format:  Fawesome

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jeffrey Scott Lando

ChabertQuest2025 is becoming a study in types of low-budget independent movies.  

This one is the "what can we shoot that's dramatic with a really small cast and give everyone stuff for their reel?" feature that's essentially a horror movie as people are trapped in a remote location and will be killed by nature.  Sometimes that is sharks, sometimes that is getting wedged between rocks.  This one is the desert.

I find these movies mostly deeply unappealing in a "your whole movie could have been an email" sort of way.  Watching a large group of people get picked off by alligators or sharks?  Sign me up!  90 minutes of a small group go through therapy and only one lives?  I'll take a pass.    

Usually the movies move slowly, are often melodramas at their heart (otherwise, why care?), and you spend the whole movie wondering why they made this and that bad decision.

Frankly, YouTubers trying to describe real-life human disasters are at least sharing something interesting because it (mostly) really happened, and is not just a made up story of some dipshits who do something stupid and pay for it while I watch.

So, yeah, I was not at all excited to spend 90 minutes watching people slowly die of thirst in the desert .  

In this movie, after crashing their car in the desert, the 4 person crew stays where they are, chooses to avoid the roads? Stays in one place all night instead of walking when it's cool out.  One of them is, of course, a complete asshole, which feels like a legal requirement.  And one has their shit together/ just happens to know everything about sharks or whatever, and no one wants to listen to them.  In this case, a nurse or doctor (the movie says both) who has enough knowledge to know how boned they truly are.

And, of course, things have to get gross, and depressing as our small cast struggles to survive.

That said...  for what this is, it isn't... awful?  The small cast is pretty good, and Chabert - who was an Executive Producer, which may be ceremonial and/ or profit sharing - is really good.  Once again, given the chance, she's solid in kind of whatever you throw her into.  This is a grown-up role and she has agency and everything.

Is it stupid?

The movie is not stupid, but the characters do stupid things, pretty much from the first scene of the movie.  Which seems avoidable at the script stage, but then there'd be no movie about people dying in the desert.

The thing is...  okay.  I spent part of lockdown watching a lot of missing persons videos on the YouTubes, and, FYI, really, really weird things happen in the woods and desert.  People really do make terrible decisions, so things happen all the time where someone wanders off a trail or gets separated and winds up dead - often like a mile from safety.  It's scary and morbid.  It's why I don't go camping.  

Also, everything involved in camping.  I like a good toilet and a sofa.  But I still know it's cooler at night than during the day and roads sometimes have people on them.  So.  I would have been the real hero of this group.

I can't really separate my disinterest in this sort of movie from how I feel about this specific movie.  I kinda don't get the point for me, but I can see actors seeing all the stuff they get to act - and if you're Lacey Chabert in 2008-2009, you are doing all kinds of voice work, indie and TV movie work and one or two studio small parts.

So, yeah, a lead in a whole movie sounds good right about now, especially one that will make people maybe forget Mean Girls and Party of Five.  .