Ice from the Sun

A low budget shot on video horror flick that kicks ass!! Great story, good cinematography, good music score, it lacks only a greater budget to make this thing a real beauty. As it stands, it is partly undeveloped, but it is full of very clever ideas and its vision is strongly reccomended to all horror fans

To anyone here who hasn't seen it, I strongly recommend this Eric Stanze film. Even considering its several flaws [grainy image, very uneven acting, sometimes-awkward dialog], it's still one of the best, most entertaining and thought-provoking micobudget independent horrors out there. I've heard it described from a cross between The Matrix and Lost Highway [not sure what that means, exactly ] to a Clive Barker film as directed by Trent Reznor, which is closer to the mark. The story can be summed up thus: an evil wizard takes his apprentice into an alternate universe of his own creation, and every few years they kidnap six people and torture-kill them, then take their souls, until the apprentice, now ultra-powerful and re-named The Presence, overthrows the wizard and takes over, prompting Heaven and Hell to recruit a female suicide victim as a sort of astral-plane assassin to pass through the wall of ice and destroy this "abomination of space and time" Gore, nudity, and lots of just plain unsettling images and sounds follow. I never thought I'd say this, but Ice From The Sun is not just a movie to be watched; it's an experience to be had.

ICE FROM THE SUN, directed by Eric Stanze, is easily the most visually stimulating movie I have seen in some time. It's just amazing to look at. Stanze paints images that are some of the most fulfilling I've seen and they leave you craving more. What's unbelievable is that he accomplished this on the micro-budget level and may have just raised the levels for all of us.

With this expressionistic tale, style and form play more important roles than content and story. Stanze mixes formats, image textures, and sounds to create some of the most effective horror film atmosphere since Sam Raimi with the original EVIL DEAD.

There isn't so much a plot as a premise which allow events to unfold. A figure known as The Presence, who was once a wizard's apprentice, has become an entity so powerful and bloodthristy that both the angels in Heaven and demons in Hell fear him. He reigns in a dimension found within magical ice scraped taken form the face of the Sun.

A young woman, Alison, is resurrected after taking her life in order to assassinate The Presence. She is instructed that while she journeys to confront The Presence, there will be 6 other mortals brought to this realm. Their roles are to die and Alison is ordered to not interfere. After all, everyone has a reason for thier existence.

The stories of The Six make up the bulk of the film. Each character is dealt scenarios that mirror their personalities. A vain woman who uses looks and sex is literally turned into a dog and put out of her misery. Fortunately Stanze sees to it that the rest of the movie isn't so O'Henry-esque and that the scenes are more of a chance to explore human nature.

I do want to pass along a note of warning, this film is graphic. Either extreme gore or abundant nudity populate almost every scene. While none of the images are designed to arouse, they nevertheless leaves the viewer breathless, amazed, and transfixed.

1st watched 10/21/2001 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Eric Stanze): Although technically this is an amazingly complicated production and the story is just as complicated, the reliance on blood and gore deter from what could have been a very mysterious and well-done psychedelic fantasy/horror film. If it didn't have so much reliance on shocking us with violence and gore I believe I could watch this a second time just to understand it better. I would like to see what other efforts this filmmaker puts out just because of his wild visual styles, but hopefully his topic will not be quite as disturbing as this one.

There was so much potential in the film. But it all diminished because of a nonsense story and worst acting ever. I don't mind bad acting ("Pieces" and "Gore Gore Girls" are hilarious). But this movie was supposed to be taken in a serious context. I couldn't believe any of the acting at all. Especially the long one part where we have the whole vital background story bluntly mumbled.

Couldn't the filmmakers embed the background story in a more creative way, rather than just having a girl read it so lifelessly as if she's being forced to read homework? I felt like I was trying to read through those long boring "User Agreement" things, which nobody reads in reality.

After closer listens to the story, I found it to be just fantasy mumbo jumbo. There was no enlightening view points given, which is something I look for in all forms of art that are taken seriously. "Dawn of the Dead" & "28 Day's Later" are good examples of horror movies that teach us something.

It's as if the poor story was just thrown in so they could have an excuse for calling the wild experimentation with cinema a "movie".

All in all, the blunder from that narration really threw me off the whole movie. I couldn't piece together any relevance to the creative bizarre (yet limited to low budget) imagery with the dialogue. The movie died in front of my eyes as far as I'm concerned after that point. Nothing could redeem the film from that horrid narration part. No wonder it's so cheap.

Eric Stanze is a true visionary. He just has to get stronger stories and a better budget. We see crap like "Biker Boyz" cost millions to make while Stanze could create so much more with that kind of money. I really wanted to like this but the story and acting were a huge disappointment.

I should probably mention the crazy parts of the film really are like a Nine Inch Nails video, as others have said. And the film does slide in strange random images, kind of like Oliver Stone. Also, there are some gore parts but it's no "Dead Alive" or "The Beyond" in that department.