Rating: D-
Dir: Rene Perez
Star: Aurelia Scheppers, David Reinprecht, Iren Levy, Nadia Lanfranconi
The IMDB synopsis managed to make this sound decent: “A mysterious presence has threatened humanity for hundreds of years as it lurks in the frozen wastes people avoid. It takes two groups of adventurers, separated in time, to defeat her and the army of demons and monsters she can summon.” The reality is quite, quite dreadful, avoiding an F-grade thanks only to the scenic, pine-clad landscapes of Shasta County in California, which are nicely photographed and look well-worth a visit. Otherwise? Awful, with two threads that never join up. One has a middle-European girl, Gerta (Levy), sees her other half abducted by the Snow Queen (Lanfranconi), a creature that exists by consuming the energy of love. Vowing to rescue her, she embarks on a quest which, it appears, takes her through a very small Renaissance Fair, to a mystical portal that takes her… Well, out of the movie entirely, it would appear.
Meanwhile, in the present day, Annika Hansen (Scheppers) is part of a science team investigating mysterious energies in the mountains, but stumbles into a militarized area protected by… Er, one guy: Colonel Wagner (Seinprecht), who is hunting a colleague that stole an advanced suit of body armour. Eventually, after a lot of faffing around, these two will end up facing the Snow Queen, who is impossible to take seriously because she has a set of antlers strapped to her head. I gave serious consideration to making this an Incredibly Bad Film Show piece, because it has so much worth mocking, or complete derision. However, it’s just not entertaining enough, shambling along at a glacial pace, with the dialogue. Broken up with such long pauses. You could make a sandwich between them. There’s way too much acting as a second language going on, though even the native English speakers are unconvincing, and the production values frequently appear to come from the “Reduced to clear” aisle of the Halloween store.
Much of what unfolds makes no coherent sense; for example, Greta’s sudden desire to strip her dress off, and wash it in a freezing mountain stream (not the only time we got gratuitous boobage through the changing of clothes), or why the Donnie Darko rabbit seems to make an appearances. Speaking of which, the so-called “army” consists of about four creatures, which show up one at a time, while supposed professional soldiers, such as Wagner and his buddy, unload entire automated clips, standing still in the open, without hitting their target or even the snow. The net result feels like Perez started off on one film, realized in production it sucked, and decided to do another on the fly. This met with no more success, but he still decided to splice the two together and release it anyway. Yeah: it’s that bad.