Avalanche

This movie is hilarious!! The effects, plot and acting are SO BAD that you'll be cracking up, or crying. It's a movie you should watch if you feel like ripping apart something. The best scene is the airplane crash, and how they just survive getting thrown around, but still jump right out. I couldn't understand how they were so scared of the ice crack, but then just slide right down it. As someone who has studied glaciers, a crevasse is dangerous and once you fall in, that's it. But as soon as they slide down it, the next scene is great because it shows them just walking out of the crevasse. Also, the models of the city and the powdered sugar used for snow are awful effects.

I would have to say based on Hollow Point, Black Point, TimeCop 3 and Ulterior Motives, OF COURSE Griffith would do a movie like this. It's practically perfect for him. I'm not saying he's a bad actor or that the movie was particularly good. I think maybe his performance made the movie worth watching.

The story line is a bit too simple but it does have a plot and that is after all what it takes to keep most movie fans in the zone. The budget was clearly too small because there was way to much green screen. But the stunts were rather good, the lines were pretty realistic and most important of all, the acting was good. It's wasn't great but no where near bad.

After starring in a movie such as Vampires one would expect Thomas Ian Griffith to not make a movie like this. It's about an evil company that builds an oil pipeline thru a snowy mountain town and causes an avalanche when it goes haywire. The avalanche FX and the terribly interwoven stock footage are the worst I've ever seen. You'll have a hot seeing how awful it is and how anyone involved with the film could allow them to be so poor. See this on TV like I did. Don't rent it. It's seriously bad. 1/10

It really is about as bad a movie as I have ever seen. It is hard to find a single redeeming thing to say about it. The acting was awful; the romance totally unbelievable. I guess I'd never seen Juneau before in a movie. I would recommend that you watch it only if trapped in a mountain cabin room with a TV but no other furniture, books, people, radios or light and if you aren't tired already because this one will certainly put you to sleep. I like disaster movies and can watch the worst of them, and have, but this one has made me rethink ever watching one ever again. It gave a whole new meaning to the catchphrase disaster movie, it is a disaster to watch, not just about a disaster.

The official, and indeed most accurate title of this film is "Avalanche", but approximately two dozen of other movies have the same title. It's also available as "Escape from Alaska", but that's a rather incorrect title because people are not trying to escape out of the state, just out of a little Alaskan town named Juneau. My point? Everything starts with a good, strong and accurate title.

I honestly don't want to sound too harsh. I really love disaster movies, the bigger the better, and "Escape from Alaska" is a fairly amiable - albeit lacking - attempt. Throughout of the 90s, there were several large-budgeted productions revolving around natural disasters, including pandemics ("Outbreak"), volcanic eruptions ("Dante's Peak", "Volcano"), meteorites ("Deep Impact", "Armageddon") and heavy storms ("Twister"), but yours truly always preferred the true magic of the 70s. I detected a bit of that seventies' spirit in "Escape from Alaska", but unfortunately not enough.

For starters, nobody was ever able to raise humongous budgets like producer Irwin Allen could. I wasn't expecting blockbuster standards, but the special effects in "Escape from Alaska" were truly poor. The miniature sets, the washing power (or whatever it was they used as snow) and the unfitting stock footage of avalanches makes the film look really pathetic. The cast isn't exactly impressive, neither. Fallen-stardom actor Thomas Howell and R. Lee Ermey are the only noteworthy names.

What the film does quite well, however, is splitting the characters into two camps with completely opposite ideals and/or initiatives. The environmental activist and her guilt-ridden helicopter pilot boyfriend form one camp, against reckless oil-industry tycoons (you can practically see the $-signs in their eyes) and middle-class Alaskan workers for whom no refinery means no income. This results in the heroic duo having to embark on clandestine pipeline inspections, rude press-conference and board-meeting interruptions and (pitiable) barfights.

Last but worst, the disasters in "Escape from Alaska" aren't disastrous enough, and there are far, far too many sentimental moments. Another unwritten rule of disaster movies is that the misery and the bad breaks keep on coming non-stop, and that when situations appears to be at their worst, it can and will still get even worse! In this film, this is only partially true. There are plane crashes, malfunctioning helicopters, and supposedly even polar bear attacks, but none of it is thrilling enough.