Reviews

Jeez, there's really nothing good to say about this movie. Dean Martin was always an inept actor, even when he had good scripts, which he did not have here. I have seen Sharon Tate in a few good roles, but I think her voice was looped by other actresses. Nancy Kwan was good in a few other roles, but she has nothing to work with here. Elke Sommer, often wooden, gives the best performance, oddly enough, and looks wonderful.

But the real problem is the rotten script. Random explosions, inexplicable car chases, unconvincing fights. None of it very good, and most of it repeated pointlessly in multiple scenes.

Is it bad enough to be funny-good? I think it's just bad. I think the producers wanted it to be a parody of the James Bond movies, without realizing that the Bond movies were already self-parodies.

Jeez, there's really nothing good to say about this movie. Dean Martin was always an inept actor, even when he had good scripts, which he did not have here. I have seen Sharon Tate in a few good roles, but I think her voice was looped by other actresses. Nancy Kwan was good in a few other roles, but she has nothing to work with here. Elke Sommer, often wooden, gives the best performance, oddly enough, and looks wonderful.

But the real problem is the rotten script. Random explosions, inexplicable car chases, unconvincing fights. None of it very good, and most of it repeated pointlessly in multiple scenes.

Is it bad enough to be funny-good? I think it's just bad. I think the producers wanted it to be a parody of the James Bond movies, without realizing that the Bond movies were already self-parodies.

JFT, this movie has every boring Martin Scorsese cliché. It's all about how terrible Italian gangsters are, but somehow they retain a chivalric nobility that makes them fundamentally noble.

Joe Pesce delivers his one-note role, the only thing he has ever played. A cheap gangster who for some reason commands respect that you would not expect from a five-foot two-inch loser. He was much better as the clichéd role in "My Cousin Vinny." In another (better, shorter) Scorsese movie, "Goodfellas," he would have been pretty good if he had been 30 years younger. But it was like watching my mother play Scarlett O'Hara.

Every single scene is an argument. That gets tedious after a while. Alan King and Don Rickles are miscast in dramatic roles. This was made when Robert DiNiro was already always playing a clichéd version of himself. Sharon Stone tries hard, but her role is not well written. Is she good? Is she evil? Why does she pretty much disappear from the middle third of the movie and spend the last third screaming? There are some Scorsese movies that are actually OK, but this is not one of them.

What a mess of a movie. It's basically ten botched episodes of "Twilight Zone" badly edited together. There's the movie about the cave paintings, the movie about the snakes in their helmets, the movie about the vases, the movie about the storm, the movie about the exploding head, the movie about the old man with wrinkles, the movie about the octopus in her tummy, the movie about the big aggressive guy, the movie about getting back to Earth. I kept seeing characters getting killed that I did not previously remember seeing in the movie. Well, I just watched him die, but who is he? Did he have any lines? Basically, this is a movie about any random poop that fit into the CGI budget.

On the other hand, the music by Chopin was nice.

There were two things that really bothered me about this movie.

The first was the huge holes in the plot. As far as I could tell in one viewing, there was absolutely no explanation how certain characters got from one place to another. The killer shows up at a remote camp with no attempt at an explanation as to how he got there, and then returns to the main camp undetected. Yes, he has an airplane, but how do you fly in and out of a remote camp undetected? If he arrived first, the others would see his plane as they landed. If he arrived afterwards, the others would hear him land. At this point I assumed the movie was going to offer an supernatural premise at the end, but that never happened, either. No one seems to notice that the killer, while off killing people at another camp, is missing from the main camp, along with his airplane. Another character appears from nowhere, with no explanation other than that he was "dropped" there, apparently with no expectation of ever leaving, but for the help of coincidental visitors.

Even after a handful of people are murdered, no one seems particularly interested in finding out who did it. No one is asked for an explanation of their whereabouts, no one is searched for blood spatter (after an axe murder!). Wouldn't a doctor be an obvious person of interest when a corpse shows up with distinctive sutures? Wouldn't a pilot be an obvious person of interest for a corpse that may have been thrown from a plane?

And that's just the beginning: Apparently the murderer has also obtains an entire set of extreme low temperature clothing that no one has noticed in six months on the base, and gets them on and off unnoticed repeatedly in a place that has virtually no privacy. Where is Delfy while Carrie gets attacked at the remote base? Why don't Carry, Pryce and Delfy search for the killer at the remote camp, since they outnumber him and have guns? Who drove the tractor at the crash site, and how did he get to the crash site without a tractor of his own? If they knew a killer lurking, why would all three go into the ice tunnel? When were the doctor and the first corpse ever in the same place for the doctor to put in the sutures? How did Rubin get back to the main camp? If Haden brought him, why didn't Haden just kill him earlier? Why doesn't Rubin reveal who his co-conspirators are if he's worried they are going to kill him? Who released the killer from the brig (it's after Rubin is dead)? Did Carrie really need a fax of the flight manifest to find three bodybags? How did they forget to put the corpses of three of their murdered comrades on the flight? Why were the diamonds hidden in the corpses? Isn't it cool that you can send a fax from an airplane in midflight?

The script was really no more than a bunch of set pieces, strung together with events that don't really rise to the level of a plot.

The second bothersome thing was the inconsistent way the cold temperatures were treated. Carrie suffers a severe injury from touching a piece of metal with her bare hands, but others seem to come away unscathed when they do similar things. The producers should have spent a little CGI money making cold breath visible and cheeks rosy.

The flashbacks didn't add much in terms of character development, but did provide me with a little time to wonder about the rest of the plot.

All that being said, the movie had a nice look and often did a good job of making the cold itself into a character.