Iced (1988)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

There's something tremendously appealing to me about snowbound horror. Great white isolation, nature itself a menace in cold immensity, and of course the beauty of red blood on fleece white snow. Iced regrettably does next to nothing with its potential, but for the bad slasher aficionado it has its merits all the same. Its set up is promising, first shot a freeze frame of skier atop a mountain, stark image, arms outstretched, poles like chill antennae against the sky. Then we have a race, defeat, romantic rejection and rage. One poorly planned night skiing excursion later and there's the back story. Then its a case of various related parties heading up to the mountains to snag a free holiday out of a condo timeshare pitch, then accosted by a ski masked maniac. Its more or less an absolute textbook example of a bad slasher, nudity, very little gore (just a couple of workable gore shots here) and delicious slices of cheese. It works on vivid characters and amusing dialogue, managing a fair level of general amusement despite having little to offer for the most part. There's John, a doctor with an off key attitude and lovely heroine Trina. There's Carl, twitchy and sarcastic cokehead (scarfs up an impressive load of the stuff at one point) who serves up a fun dream sequence and wired paranoia. Best of all is Jeanette, essayed in lively fashion by Lisa Loring, giving her all for the piece like it counts for something, nicely sexual stuff (that's a carrot in your mouth, not a dick! !). Dialogue is for the most part pleasing, especially in a spell of bad date reminiscence (drive in tissue boob fiasco!) and the actors have good chemistry, there's a nice sense of disparate friends uniting and trying to make a holiday work. Things are regrettably a good deal too slow though, most of the deaths are crammed into the final block and the few sex scenes and occasional boobs don't quite hold the weight of maintaining interest, moreover the direction is generally style free (though director Jeff Kwitny did later make a rocking trashfest by the name of Death Train) and the plotting lacks suspense. Things do perk up fairly nicely in the final twenty minutes or so, with tension, fair kills and the odd giggle from continuity errors, culminating in one of the gnarliest lunatic freeze frame closers I've ever seen. Oh, and the music packs some nice daftoid tunage if memory serves. Little here to recommend to anyone that isn't already a devotee of crappy slashers, but to those that are this one is just about worth tapping for a one time watch.

I start to watch this in earnest, but eventually had to go for the forward-scan button, and used it pretty generously.A group of college students are at a ski resort where people are night skiing with flares. Two of the guys get into an argument over one of the women. They settle their differences with a race without flares. The winner has sex with the women, and the angry loser goes skiing again on his own, again without a flare. He takes a bad jump, and lands on some rocks and apparently dies.Four years later, everyone in the group has been invited to try out a new ski resort as a promotion. One of them is killed before he gets to the resort by a guy in a blue ski outfit with broken orange-tinted ski goggles (with some shots from his POV through the broken goggles). There are lots of boring talky scenes that don't serve the plot or character development. The rest of the deaths don't occur until much later in the movie. Some atypical weapons, but poorly handled.One odd scene has the women in the kitchen, preparing food. One of them is cutting carrots. She does so in the oddest way I've ever seen. She holds the knife straight up in the air, and pushes the carrots against the stationary knife to cut them lengthwise. Dumb! And it's not a lead-up to her cutting herself, either, just some random thing.The killer is more or less obvious through Ebert's Law of Character Economy, although he seems to be in more than one place at once. The final scene is set five years later, and is pretty stupid. The only other ski resort horror movie I'm aware of (but haven't seen), Shredder (2003) (V), has to be better than this.

Really, the 80's cheese is the only thing this movie has going for it. I won't give anything away, but it's really predictable. The acting is terrible, the camera work is terrible, the script is terrible, the editing is terrible. The MOVIE is terrible.I highly recommend watching this movie only if:(a) you enjoy making fun of terrible movies (b) you watch it with several other people who like making fun of terrible movies (c) you are not entirely sober (d) you enjoy suffering from boredom and bad acting (e) all of the above.This movie is terrible. Am I repeating myself? Trust me, it's worth repeating. I've seen worse, but still... Whoof. Not good.

ICED is one of the most moronic slashers ever conceived. A guy in a ski suit and broken ski goggles kills people at a log cabin. Very scary...not. The whole thing is completely forgettable. And the killings don't start until the last part of the film. The characters and situations are not interesting enough to sustain one's interest all the way to when the action starts and when the killings do start, no one cares about anything or anyone. And there's a really stupid "surprise" ending. No wonder horror movies died in the 1980s.A total waste of time.