Folks, I just had the graphic displeasure of watching “Ice From the Sun,” a hundred and sixteen minutes of the most confusing, blood-drenched, godawful slop I’ve ever been forced to endure.
It was almost, but not quite, worse than “Terror Toons”. “Ice From the Sun” sucks for a much different reason than “Terror Toons” did.
You see, “Terror Toons” was just lousy.
But “Ice From the Sun” was lousy that TOOK ITSELF SERIOUSLY.
Now, before I lead off into a several hundred word lambasting, let me get the business out of the way and also illustrate my point at the same time. The plot of “Ice From the Sun” revolves around an evil wizard and his apprentice who, somehow, built their own dimension after they committed suicide and went to the third place instead of heaven or hell. They accomplished this by killing the wizard’s apprentice’s girlfriend, and then drinking her blood. So after they arrive in their own dimension, which they have control over, they then spend the next several hundred years randomly taking six people off the face of the earth and bringing them to THEIR dimension to play drawn out, cruel games with them that end up in their deaths and their souls’ imprisonment in their dimension.
Needless to say, heaven and hell are excruciatingly (no pun intended) pissed off with this arrangement, and thus recruit a girl who just slit her wrists in the bathtub to go to said dimension (via a method that makes no sense) and assassinate the wizard’s apprentice. He’s the only one left over there after the wizard eventually died, you know.
How can she defeat him, you ask? By reminding him of his former humanity.
I think most of you now see why I had such a problem with “Ice From the Sun.”
It’s the single most convoluted and ridiculous plotline I’ve ever seen.
This is a plotline that would probably require six movies to tell correctly, compressed into one two-hour package. It takes Stanze eight minutes to roll the opening credits, for crying out loud! Why? Because he’s running a damn MUSIC VIDEO over them!
It’s plain that Stanze is a victim of his own ambition. Or, more properly, his own overambition.
Even worse, when “Ice From the Sun” isn’t actively engaged in being confusing, it’s being downright repulsive. Stanze’s opening music video is a weird, blood-soaked, clip show kind of music video. In fact, the whole first ten minutes is so unnecessarily drenched in blood I found myself nostalgic for Clive Barker’s old movies. The first five minutes feature murder, torture, and a naked guy smacking the hell out of a concrete wall. Stanze takes cues from “Hellraiser” so obvious that they could be used for ROAD FLARES.
Trust me, there will be an absolute surfeit of people getting cut up, cut open, and otherwise creatively butchered for the remainder of the two hours. Watch for, among other things, a man suffocated in plastic wrap, cut free, his stomach cut open, and congestant medication inserted directly into the wound, and a girl dragged naked behind a pickup truck on a loose gravel road and then covered in salt.
Perhaps the worst blow to my psyche came from the back of the box when Buried.com described this rolling slag heap as “…the future of indie horror.”
Frankly, if THIS is the future, then let me out of the genre NOW. “Ice From the Sun” was a pile of garbage so vile and incomprehensible that I wouldn’t pause to spit on the script if I found it burning on my living room floor.
The ending is two streams of dialogue that go on simultaneously…and though we find out that our wrist-slitting heroine saves the day (as though anything else could happen), we do NOT get to find out her choice of reward. Nice, Eric. No, audiences don’t need CLOSURE! No! It’s ALWAYS better to not know what happens at the end of a movie!!
The special features include three commentary tracks, a behind the scenes featurette, a music score featurette, audition footage, facts about the film, a stills gallery, music videos, a collection of trailers and assorted easter eggs.
All in all, kudos, Eric…you made six movies at once and not a one of them makes so much as an ounce of sense. “Ice From the Sun” was two solid hours of pointless, incomprehensible torture wrapped up in a plot so mean and mindless that I literally weep for the genre.
