Traque en haute montagne

I caught this film -- under the title of "What Lies Above" -- on Lifetime movie network last night, and just had to comment on it. Designed as a resourceful-woman-in-peril, action adventure yarn, it is so unintentionally funny (thanks in large part to Marc Singer's scenery-chewing hammy performance)that I thought I was watching a cross between "Cliffhanger" and "Home Alone 5." Heroine Nicole Eggert makes her devious but dumb as dirt male pursuers look like the Three Stooges succumbing to her ridiculous makeshift booby traps (somehow she manages to devise a swinging battering ram with rope and a log in a matter of minutes, which temporarily takes out one of the knuckleheads who want to kill her). Worth watching for a hearty laugh.

So I caught this one afternoon as "What Lies Above" and actually watched it because the beginning was somewhat promising. The heroine, Diana Pennington, is a mountain climbing expert...but that doesn't help her when her fiancé Brian gets hurt on a climb. When she goes off to get help and returns, he disappears from the mountain, never to be seen again.

Two years later, Diana is still a climber...but she won't go near Snowman's Pass. That is, until Curt Seaver appears and tells her that he can find the body of her lost fiancé with a new satellite program. She agrees and they take off up the mountain with Curt's two assistants: His "bodyguard" Hugo and the computer whiz Tyler. From the start, you know that there's some ulterior motive going on, but unfortunately the twists aren't good and lead to a laughably bad chase sequence that makes up the last 20 or 30 minutes of the movie.

The major disappointments are the red herrings, most of which have supernatural undertones that never come to fruition. The object from the sky that fell into the mountains (which turns out to be not so supernatural), the story of how Snowman's Pass came to be, and the most memorable one of them all: Diana's dream sequence halfway through the movie. But what disappointed me most is where they dropped the ball. The majority of the movie revolves around the search for Brian, that's why I can't for the life of me begin to understand why the mystery of what exactly happened to him and where he was is never solved through the course of the movie. This was the major plot. This was how the movie STARTED! How do you NOT wrap that up?

I wouldn't tell too many people to bother with this one...

"What Lies Above" 2004. It goes by different titles .. Original Title: Snowman's Pass 2004; Now Title: What Lies Above 2004; and YouTube Title: Death Pass 2004 // Marc Singer has a great personna, but he is hammy. If you thought he was hammy in the Beast Master TV Series, 2001-02 ... you will be shocked to find out he is even more hammy in this. The story is pretty cookie cutter, and they try to get all into techy stuff, but between the writers and the director, no one knows the difference between a floppy disk and a monkey wrench. // The Bushwacker 10/3/2021.

The title I was looking up was Snowman's Pass thinking it was a Bigfoot movie, which I love. Then see the title What Lies Above. Really not what I was thinking.

I saw this on a boring Sunday morning just this morning. Well I was drawn to the fact that it's an outdoor movie.. I was hoping to find some nice sceneries but it the views where just limited.. They just go back and forth in the same spot all over again.. I hate it when they're using this so called hi-tech stuffs like the this Motorola blue-tooth headset they're using to eliminate the use of a walkie talkie it was just so funny.. they look like amateurs. And they where like advertising those badly designed alien-ware Laptops that could link up to a satellite to find people.. I couldn't say more about this TV-movie.. The ending was bad that it looks like they cut it short eliminating the use of rescue helicopters and etc.. */**********