Snowman's Pass

The limited scenery views were the only saving grace to an otherwise uneventful and boring movie. The acting was borderline absurd which I blame on the script and screenplay. Nicole Eggert didn't look the part, didn't act the part, and was totally unconvincing as a mountain guide. After watching this I was left with the feeling that some friends had some free time and decided to make a movie. It must have been produced on a budget of pocket change. The plot was thin at best and with the low caliber of acting at times it begged the question to be asked, "Why are we doing this?". I managed to sit through the entire movie but also asked myself, "Why?".

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...

I love suspense movies. I love Marc Singer. When he plays a villain, he is truly frightening....but the acting here was just so over the top, it makes one wonder, who was directing this movie and who did he know to get the job?. Now, if just one of the actors' performances was bad one could look to blame the actor....perhaps. However,in this case EVERYONES performances were so over the top that they were comical at best and an insult to the audience. It seemed as if not one of these actors had ever acted in front of a camera before. Yet, I have seen many of the actors from this production, in other movies and they were very good if not down right great. I can only put the blame for this "Made for TV movie" on inadequate directing and poor writing. We can not always blame the actors when the movie misses...and this movie misses by miles. I was incredibly disappointed.

Judging by the slew of bad reviews, the 2004 made-for-TV movie, "What Lies Above" (aka "Snowman's Pass") is a load of rubbish. I'm sure it was just that – on TV where tension was dissipated by incessant rounds of atmosphere-destroying commercials. On DVD, however, "Snowman's Pass" comes across despite all its faults (shaky acting, a holey plot, obvious penny-pinching), as fairly suspenseful entertainment. Indeed it actually delivers a few really exciting, edge-of-the-seat moments. Marc Singer's acting was certainly over-the-top, but nonetheless enjoyably grotesque. The other leads (particularly Nicole Eggert, George Stults) were okay. Admittedly the three minor players (the soon-to-be-departed boyfriend, the dull storekeeper, the inattentive weather station jerk) were less than impressive, but none of them were on-screen long enough to do too much damage.

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.. */**********