Snowman's Pass

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 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 .

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.

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...

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?".