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.

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.

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 watched this afternoon film on the first afternoon of my Christmas holidays .Otherwise I think would have given it a miss but just wanted to chill and unwind.

The basic storyline is that of a young newly engaged woman , engaged a matter of minutes on top of a minute when her fiancé is killed . Move on two years and she is again on the mountain leading some odd guys on a rather ridiculous quest .

The acting was rather over the top especially the lead man , who has a weird expression akin to Christopher Lloyd in back to the future. The end was really cheesy and naff and I could never quite work out what happened to the disappeared body .

Somehow, I really thought that I was going to enjoy this film because I love pictures with mountain climbing and a great mystery in the plot. I must say that the photography was fantastic and there was some scary scenes that captured my attention. I thought that Nicole Eggert,(Diana Pennington),"Thank You, Good Night",'01 played a very convincing role as a young girl who had a tragic loss in her life and meets up with some characters who want her to guide them up the mountain. Marc Singer, "Angel Blade",'02, played a very unconvincing weird guy and over acted in many scenes with a bad temper that looked comical. This film was a big disappointed and not worth watching, unless there is nothing on the TV to ENJOY!!