Iced (1988)

A buch of friends goes skiing, with one of them a bit unstable resulting in him being scorned by the girl he likes. He then kills himself and five years later they are all invited to a cabin in a newbuilt skiing area, not knowing that are all going to pay... Yes, a classic slasherplot.

Iced makes me want to go medieval on it's ass. Plain and simple. "Thou shalt remain in obscurity, never to be seen again!!" It has all the ingredients a nice slasher should have, boobs and violence, but this is proof that even that wont help. It took me two weeks to watch the damn thing, with the biggest problem being a scene at the 55 minute mark that made me want to vomit everytime I turned on the movie. And even better, the killer murders one victim fifteen minutes into the movie but after that we get just talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk until after the hour when the killing starts. Most of these kills are pretty unspectacular, especially the old radiator in bath gag, and even worse is the icicle in the eye bit, which isnt shown at all! Shame upon the makers of Iced...

Iced, this little masterpiece that we're talking about, was written by Joseph Alan Johnson who also acts in the movie (I was gonna say that he is the worst of the lot, but with such a group of masterful thespians, I'm not sure). He was also seen in Berserker and House of lost souls, the tv-movie by Umberto Lenzi where he also was the absolutely worst actor. Not a bad feat, considering the poor (and appalingly dubbed) actors in HOLS. He fills Iced with tons and tons of dialogue, to make sure that we realize that all the characters are having lots of problems with their relationships, which is exactly what we want when we are watching a slasher. Johnson even writes himself a juicy sexscene which in itself is very odd, since he starts dreaming about it before the characters even meet. The "seduction" scene where Johnson tries to seduce one of the ladies is the scene I could barely get past wher the two are lying on a rug in front of the fire, staring into each others eyes and saying stupid things. Fucking hell, what is this drivel?!? AAARGH!

Where was I? Oh, yes. Iced. If you manage to watch the first 60 out of 85 minutes you actually get to some violence and there is a nice scene where an asshole doctor gets a skipole through his throat. Other than that the violence is pretty dull or not shown at all. One of the damsels in distress shows herself naked several times which somewhat adds to some sort of entertainment, but her haircut is straight out of the darkest abyss of the eighties so I dont really know if I should be aroused or go mad by the sheer sight of it. And then there is the twist towards the end... the reveal of the killer. We see the killer standing outside the cabin, and then cut to the remaining survivor calling the killer who is at home asleep, waking him up. Eh? Yes, that is somewhat spoilerish but who cares? He is the only available alternative anyway. It is just idiotic. To top it all off, we get a another 5 years later twist which is so corny and dumb that it just makes me smile.

There is just one more thing I want to mention before we wrap this up. The guy who plays the cold cokesniffing punk with a gun and the worlds smallest ponytail, doesnt he look a lot like the guy who gets his head sawed of with a chainsaw in House of lost souls? I'll fix some screenshots later...

Oh well, this is 85 minutes I'll never get back. There isnt much talent behind or in front of the camera and they killed themselves with the slowest pace since Tarkovskijs Stalker. There is a nice kill or two towards the end but this is basically only for the slasherfreak who has to see everything. Everyone else, keep away. Very far away.