Hell hath frozen over here at Horror Press, and as one of the world’s premiere 1980s slasher obsessives, I thought this might be the perfect time to crack into my unwatched VHS of the 1988 skiing slasher Iced. Here’s the gist. Four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends (Doug Stevenson, Debra De Liso, John C. Cooke, Elizabeth Gorcey, Michael Picardi, Ron Kologie, and the original Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring) is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff’s cracked ski mask, who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge?
Is Iced a Good Slasher Movie?
Unfortunately, like many meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. The real estate agent Alex Bourne (played by the movie’s screenwriter, Joseph Alan Johnson), in particular, is a disastrously beige nonentity.
The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, forcing you to spend time watching this group of people have a mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.
There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far, the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table.
Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.
What Does Iced Do Well?
Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.
For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.
As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.
What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the cracks in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.
However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh-so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die-hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.
Score: 4/10