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.
