Iced

A lot of fun take it for what it is a fun night in with some cool kills this is more than worth a watch, I have seen alot worse from more well known horror icons

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.

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.

At a bustling, whitely glistering ski resort we are boisterously introduced to a gaudy gaggle of morally despicable, self-absorbed ski-headed skells making Alpine whoopee and these duplicitous degenerates denigrate one of their number Jeff until an altercation breaks out over the perceived proprietary rights of the uber blonde-headed schmoe bunny Trina (Debra DeLiso) until meat-faced Cory (Doug Stevenson) and the neurasthenic Jeff throws down and much like the similarly snow-coned 'The Chill Factor' they must race to save alpha male face and win the additional grace from the not-exactly fair maiden. This fatefully frosty contest proceeds with a weirdly realized downhill race with the net result being the loser Jeff endures great shame thereby losing his capricious girl, the scrappy race and, perhaps even his mind!

4 years later these snow-seeking simps converge for a weekend of wintry high junks at 'Snowy Peaks' where they plan to do the same tired shizz as before and not long into their chilly shenanigans the serious matter of stalk and slash begins in deadly earnest, except Jeff Kwitney's 'Iced' takes the singular approach of playing his delightfully absurd horror movie out like a Hallmark Christmas special, cannily replacing the saccharine sentimentality with righteous B-movie excess, his fabulously frost-bitten freak show serves up delightfully amateur hour 'acting', hilariously crass love scenes, perfectly malodorous dialogue which along with its plethora of ice-cool ski slope slayings and savage ski lodge stabbings unexpectedly coalesces into a delirious miasma of cruddy death-dealing delights!

Composer Dan Milner's score has a tasty Richard Band quality, boisterously exaggerating 'Iced's suitably hysterical climax. The film's winning lack of sophistication and soft-core slap n' tickle aesthetic merely increases its bizarrely compelling nature; it's not great cinema but readily satisfies baser instincts as a cheap and trashy grot-fest! There's also a fragrant campiness to the cod-ball chatter and 'eclectic' acting talent that not infrequently increases its entirely welcome comedic element, and the harder it tries to be a serious slasher, the more wildly successful it becomes as a 'so-bad-its-good' delight, and you've got a snowball in hell's chance of chilling out to anything remotely like it made today!