Anyone who watched 80s ski movies knows the drill: if you find yourself vacationing at a mountain resort, you’ll likely find yourself in a rivalry that can only be resolved through a downhill race. Normally these scenes come at the end of a movie, not the beginning, but Iced is no normal movie. When the bully loses the competition, and the victor ends up with his girl, the bully gets drunk, skis off into a snowstorm, and gets himself killed. Four years later, the very group of friends who gathered on that faithful night have been invited to a timeshare pitch at a brand new ski resort. Eventually they begin dropping like flies.
Iced was one of those movies that, from the very second I saw the box art, I was instantly engaged. An 80s ski resort/slasher film with a modern restoration by boutique distributor Vinegar Syndrome? How lucky can a middle aged movie blogger get! Surely you’ve had similar moments of intuition: a movie-viewer relationship that seemed destined by the stars themselves….
Unfortunately, this was not destiny. This is a shot-on-video (SOV) horror flick whose murder scenes are so gentle they’re as irritating as a sneeze that refuses to budge. Taking place off screen as much as on, the kills generally lack umph. This could have been helped by some crunchier/squishier sound effects, but instead we get bizarrely quiet deaths. Consider the snow plow that idles toward a hapless victim in one shot and simply reveals bloody clothes in the next. And that’s the last kill you see for nearly an hour.
While the movie skimps on blood and guts, it doesn’t skimp on sex and nudity. Perhaps it’s not quite as racy as, say, Red Shoe Diaries, but when these graphic scenes are nestled within batches of soap opera acting, the contrast is jarring. This isn’t a movie in which the Vaseline-blurred camera respectfully turns its head as soon as the characters climb in bed. It’s a movie with full frontal and position changes. If only the kills had been so titillating.
Whereas most SOV flicks I’ve seen were at least a few steps away from a professional production, Iced is competently shot, though incompetently edited at times. Often it looks as spiffy as anything you’d see on prime time television in the late 80s, whereas a spiritual cousin such as Video Violence was clearly produced by amateurs (which in my opinion, is part of the appeal of SOV). I am not at all disappointed that I watched it, but most probably will be. The weirdos who won’t be disappointed already know who you are. Everyone else can safely skip it.
My favorite scene is when the heroine wakes up after a long night’s sleep, realizes she’s in danger, arms herself with a knife, and immediately dozes off again. You had one job, Trina. For fuck’s sake.
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