Temporada de Sangue

Maybe it was the beer talking, but Iced was a perpetual favorite amongst my friends and I during our college days. A poorly-made skiing-themed slasher with virtually no gore, the film somehow managed to entertain time and time again.

From the Rockadiles t-shirt to Debra Deliso's workout using a rolling pin, this baby is is pure, unfettered bad fun. We've got the most painfully inept man on Earth trying to escape a snowplow. There's some hilariously unintentional homo-erotic moments between two male friends as they lie in the snow together. We've got piles of cocaine you could go sledding on, a killer who leaves messages in puffy paint, and gratuitous Wednesday Addams nudity.

The score, which I find myself humming at least a few times a year, is so bad, its great... and the ending? Wooo baby. If you haven't seen how this delicious piece of cheese ends, then you haven't seen jack.

Iced is a wonderful film. Sure, its wonderfully bad, but that won't stop be from loving every last moment of it.

Now where's my DVD?!

"Iced" focuses on a group of friends who reunite at a posh ski resort after their friend died in a skiing accident four years earlier. Naturally, more members of the group are destined to die.

This shot-on-video slasher flick directed by Jeff Kwitny ("Beyond the Door III") is a prime slice of late-'80s cheese picked off the video rental store shelf. If you know, you know. "Iced" is certainly not a good film, but it is a real low-budget charmer with its fair share of spilt blood.

The setup is banal and predictable (as is the case with most films of this ilk), but what "Iced" has going for it is a snowy atmosphere paired with dark cabin interiors, big hair (it was filmed in 1988, after all), and a fair amount of interpersonal drama between the group of friends that feels as though it could have been plucked from an episode of an '80s soap opera.

Obviously this will not appeal to all tastes, and the film does suffer from some choppy editing that really shows its budgetary restrictions. The performances are also shaky at best, but the ski-suited killer makes some menacing appearances throughout, and the despite the slow-burn nature of the first hour, things do ramp up into full-blown slasher territory in the last thirty minutes, when the bodies start to fall.

Ultimately, the reveal is predictable and the killer's logic stilted at best, but genre fans don't seek out these types of films for nuance. "Iced" is a delirious good time, and an amusing relic of its era. For a no-budget slasher, it stands as a decent shot-on-video facsimile of more polished films. 6/10.

A group of friends accept an invite to stay as a ski lodge but there's a crazy skier out in the snow who is intent on killing them all, one by one. This late entry in the 1980's slasher cycle has bad acting, bad script, bad plot, bad fashions and bad kill scenes. Pretty much everything about Iced is bad, with the exception of the Utah, snow covered scenery and the plentiful sex and nudity. Most of the killings only take place in the last half hour. When the Final Girl realises that there's a killer outside instead of phoning the police she instead rings the chalet manager! Hilarious! Probably the only noteworthy thing here is Lisa Loring, of the original Addams Family, now all grown up and very naked. For me Iced is a difficult film to score. To be brutally honest it is terrible, deserving a 3/10 at best. However, I found it to be of the so bad it's good variety, this slice of cheese often had me laughing, hence my 6/10.

Sigh … I suppose I'll never be able to claim that I've seen all 80's slashers ever made, because here's yet another one I never even heard or read about before today. Oh well, "Iced" certainly isn't a great loss and not at all worth tracking down unless you're an avid fan of the decade and/or the sub genre. The story takes place in a skiing resort – duh – where the usual crowd of teenage stereotypes gathered together for a holiday of fun, until of course a homicidal maniac decides to pick them off one by one. I wouldn't exactly call this original, but since most 80's slashers took place either on high school grounds or in sunny summer camps, I'll reward this movie with half a point extra for its setting. A couple years ago during a previous ski trip in the same resort, the popular girl of the bunch had to choose between two admirers. Her resolute choice for the hunky guy drove the loser to commit suicide and now it looks like he's back from the dead with a vengeance. I know, that's not very groundbreaking either. Like sadly too often the case in this sort of movies, the murders only begin to occur in the third act of the film. The first hour only features false scares, juvenile pranks, dull flashbacks and some welcome nudity. Lisa Loring plays one of the girls who gets topless quite frequently. I mainly know her as little Wednesday from the original "The Addams Family", so I hope it doesn't sound too perverted to mention her naked chest as one of the film's only highlights.

There's something tremendously appealing to me about snowbound horror. Great white isolation, nature itself a menace in cold immensity, and of course the beauty of red blood on fleece white snow. Iced regrettably does next to nothing with its potential, but for the bad slasher aficionado it has its merits all the same. Its set up is promising, first shot a freeze frame of skier atop a mountain, stark image, arms outstretched, poles like chill antennae against the sky. Then we have a race, defeat, romantic rejection and rage. One poorly planned night skiing excursion later and there's the back story. Then its a case of various related parties heading up to the mountains to snag a free holiday out of a condo timeshare pitch, then accosted by a ski masked maniac. Its more or less an absolute textbook example of a bad slasher, nudity, very little gore (just a couple of workable gore shots here) and delicious slices of cheese. It works on vivid characters and amusing dialogue, managing a fair level of general amusement despite having little to offer for the most part. There's John, a doctor with an off key attitude and lovely heroine Trina. There's Carl, twitchy and sarcastic cokehead (scarfs up an impressive load of the stuff at one point) who serves up a fun dream sequence and wired paranoia. Best of all is Jeanette, essayed in lively fashion by Lisa Loring, giving her all for the piece like it counts for something, nicely sexual stuff (that's a carrot in your mouth, not a dick! !). Dialogue is for the most part pleasing, especially in a spell of bad date reminiscence (drive in tissue boob fiasco!) and the actors have good chemistry, there's a nice sense of disparate friends uniting and trying to make a holiday work. Things are regrettably a good deal too slow though, most of the deaths are crammed into the final block and the few sex scenes and occasional boobs don't quite hold the weight of maintaining interest, moreover the direction is generally style free (though director Jeff Kwitny did later make a rocking trashfest by the name of Death Train) and the plotting lacks suspense. Things do perk up fairly nicely in the final twenty minutes or so, with tension, fair kills and the odd giggle from continuity errors, culminating in one of the gnarliest lunatic freeze frame closers I've ever seen. Oh, and the music packs some nice daftoid tunage if memory serves. Little here to recommend to anyone that isn't already a devotee of crappy slashers, but to those that are this one is just about worth tapping for a one time watch.