Last year’s review of the original Until Dawn on PS4 did left me with a peckish for icy, wintery slasher flicks, i did mention this in the review itself, so instead of The Chill Factor, we’re doing Iced, a forgotten slasher that i’m surprised doesn’t have an Arrow Video rerelease.
That’s because Vinegar Syndrome did release this one on Blu Ray (via their sub-label Degausser Video) last January, though i wouldn’t mind an import friendlier option later down the line.
Iced definitely doesn’t wanna reinvent the “slasher wheel”, as its premise it’s indeed pretty typical.
A group of friends are mysteriously invited to a ski resort, only to be systematically stalked and killed by a masked serial killer.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with how one of their friends, Jeff, died 4 years ago in a nightime skiing accident after being dumped by his fiancèe.
Here i would say that yes, it actually has nothing to do with the incident, but to be fair the dude died while skiing, and he was skiing because he was challenged by another…. “specimen” for his girlfriend, so they “race for the babe” (the babe opinion not polled or accounted for, as usual) at night. With skis. On the snow covered icy mountains. AT NIGHT.
Yeah, i’m tempted to chalk up the incident (because it is an accident) as “spontaneous natural selection”, as is the bully stereotype that loses the race, gets drunk, skiis into a snowstorm and gets himself killed.
Right off the bat, even in this Blu-Ray release it looks astoningly cheap, even if Vinegar Syndrome says it was restored from the best surviving master tape, it just looks like someone filmed themselves dicking around ski slopes during their winter vacation, as it’s clearly a shot-on-video affair (when it’s dark you will be able to tell, let’s just say this), one step down from still cheap but otherwise more “film looking” low budget regional ’80s slashers, but admittely competently shot, looks more like a film than Video Violence, for example.
It frankly looks like a slighly improved VHS rip, to be honest, which might be a plus for more VHS nostalgic horror fans… i lived in that era and i would have preferred the movie to look less like shit, but if this is indeed the best restoration possible (and most likely is since it’s a SOV film, not even God himself could carve a 4K version of this stuff), i do get some chills.
Iced is also one of those films that make one wonder if we should stop throwing around the word “cult film” for these horror niche releases as it creates some expectations…. only for those to be “let down” by reality, as this isn’t exactly the “good bad fun” 80s slasher made with pocket change you’d expect. Yet is cheap, very cheap, not good… but it’s also not the gorefest you’d think.
Sure, there are some fun, creative tools and methods of killing the victims, BUT it’s also another one of “those” slasher films, so cheap it can’t even afford to show most of its kills, the only reason people even put on movies like these for,
Sorry, i do not consider “kills” when you cut away before the actual kill happens and then back to an aftermath that often doesn’t show the victim’s body either, especially since the sound design is mostly absent, so these “kills by implication” also are very quiet, too quiet, and very sparse too, with sometimes one “kill” being the only idea of blood & implied murder you’ll get for 1 hour of film, until the third act where these mostly… are still more often implied than shown, and even so they are “blink and miss em” levels of brief.
Also don’t tease a snow plow kill and then cut to bloody clothes and snow.
Sure as shit they ain’t gonna be intrigued by the stock characters lacking any depth , or the frankly not well edited “ski action”, though it’s for the best this doesn’t come back after the first act, the music is nice (i do enjoy the selection of “period tunes”) but the original compositions also clearly have to do some heavy lifting and sustain often not great editing.
While the kills are basically left for the viewer to imagine what they might be like if they could have afforded to actually shoot them, the movie does deliver the other element of the “slasher package”, as in nudity and coitus, that one might wonder if they planned to shoot something else and figured they need something to “excuse”, or if they just figured the average watcher won’t care about the “kills” being shit if there’s fuckin in it, and they definitely overcompensated, though it’s oddly progressive for a ’80s slasher since you also get plenty of man asses.
I will not outright spoil the twist, but let’s just say you will see the twist reveal come, not much of a spoiler since the twist itself it’s a cop out (especially since it’s such a badly edited reveal too, kinda hilarious in context), and the motivations behind the whole thing barely make sense, with the final, final twist to freeze frame over making even less fuckin sense and explaining nothing.
To be honest, despite my grievances, Iced does fit the “cult niche slasher” bill is because it’s pretty bad and inintentionally funny: for example later in the film, the final girl wakes from a full night of sleep, realizes she IS in danger, grabs a gun and (due to the editing) it looks like she almost immediatly fell aslee while waiting to jump the killerr. Still, most of the time it feels like the film wants to be a soap opera, extra jarring when its cuts to n fro scenes of people porking.
Ultimately, Iced it’s not devoid of value, for example the POV of the cracked ski mask is a very nice touch/spin, but overall the film just exists in this odd side limbo, where it’s a pretty slow moving film but not a proper slog, yet not interesting or even mediocre, bad but not really that bad, there are so many far worse titles in the genre that is simply pointless to get mad about this one, even with the pretty dang bad acting, at least it can range to decent thanks to Lisa Loring (of the old live action Addams Family tv series’ fame) even if everyone else is…. notably worse.
It’s a film that’s just kinda there, in this awkward sub-mediocrity stratum, not deep in the abyss but still something only for the slasher superbuffs that have seen everything or are on a quest to do so.
Maybe you’ll get more out of it if you have a thing for winter slashers specifically and consider nudity THAT important to the slasher film enjoyment, but even so your time might be better spent on stuff like the already mentioned The Chill Factor or the more craptacular Satan’s Blade.
A mostly goreless slasher where the kills have to be filled in by the viewers imagination (and are incredibly tame in spirit too) IS a hard sell, even with its abundant nudity and it often being so stupid it’s unintentionally hilarious you almost wanna like it, since it’s not even consistent at that.
Director Jeff Kwitny eventually would find luck as a writer for animated kids shows like DIC’s Street Sharks, Action Man, Mummies Alive, heck, even wrote for the original Animaniacs series and one episode of Cartoon Network’s Cow And Chicken and one episode of Warner Brother’s Histeria!, an edutaiment historical meta comedy series of sorts, can’t say i’ve ever heard of this one.
But before that he also did SOV stuff like Iced, so you do never know.
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