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This outstanding horror film reminds us that there is no reason on Earth that low-budget movies have to be
bad, nor do they even have to be limited to easy set-ups about some local teens trapped in an old house.
Writer-director Eric Stanze (SAVAGE HARVEST) shows here that the only limit to what you can do is your
own imagination, and Stanze clearly has imagination to burn. Creating a new mythology, pitting a lone human
against the ruler of an alternate dimension as the only savior of Earth, Heaven, and Hell, all for the cost of
the average cheap slasher movie? No problem. If Michael Ninn ever made a horror picture, this is what it
might look like.
The film opens with a woman named Vicki being attacked and garroted in a vacant lot while a naked bald
man, the evil Abraham, beats on the floor and walls of an underground room. The attacker, Steven, seems
to suffer from strange hallucinations which allows Vicki to escape. She finds herself in a field near a picnic
table, where she vomits. Back in the lot, Steven's knees are blown out and his head is gorily blown off by
Abraham. After an outstanding title sequence, we land in a suburban garage, where a man is given a
magical box. Then we meet the heroine of our story, Alison, who listens to Vicki being interviewed on TV
about her horrifying experience in which five of her friends were killed.
Alison slashes her wrists in the bathtub, but is intercepted in the afterlife, chosen for a mission by both the
angels in Heaven and the devils in Hell. A nude female being tells Alison a long and complex mythological
story about a man from another dimension who every few years chooses six humans for a torturous game,
ending in their deaths. The dimension is surrounded by ice scraped off the sun (thus the title), and the
humans are trapped inside by Abraham, who eventually took over when he destroyed Steven and allowed
Vicki to escape. Apparently Steven had established temporary control, which he lost when he failed to kill
Vicki, the sixth human in the last round of the game.
Alison is chosen to pass through the ice along with some drug dealers who live in a group house, and
charged with assassinating Abraham during the next round. Alison doubts her abilities, but the being tells
her to remind Abraham that he was once a human, capable of feeling love. If that happens, the ice around
his dimension will melt, allowing the angels and devils to move in and take over. When Alison wakes up,
she's in a bathtub with her wrists intact, but she's in the other dimension. During the rest of the film, she is
assaulted by various surrealistic horrors while attempting to bring down Abraham's evil reign.
ICE FROM THE SUN is perhaps the darkest "head film" ever made, a relentless barrage of bizarre and
frightening imagery set to an ominous musical score by Matt Meyer and Brian McClelland, and expertly
staged by Stanze, production designer Tommy Biondo, and FX men Tony Bridges and Jeff Bergeron.
Mixing David Berliner's eerie color and b/w photography, razor-sharp editing, and some truly impressive
setpieces, Stanze has given horror fans a hellish vision of a dimension soaked in blood and pain, and --
unlike even most big-budget attempts to do the same -- given the central struggle a weight and significance
which will keep viewers spellbound.
I've seen a lot of horror movies -- over five thousand at last count -- and it's been very rare that I've seen
something on this scale pulled off so well at any budget, let alone the peanuts with which Stanze had to
work with here. In fact, as interesting as the story is, the visuals are so impressive that the film's best ultimate
use may be for huge video-walls at some of those cavernous E-fueled rave clubs which seem to crave darker
and more bizarre eye-candy material every week.
Be warned, however... this is heavy stuff. At one point, a man drags a nude woman behind a truck until she is
completely covered with bloody wounds, then pours rock salt on her whimpering form. And that's one of the
more restrained sequences. I won't even go into the surgery scene for fear of sending sensitive readers
screaming away to disney.com. One of the most sadistic and horrifying American films ever made, ICE
FROM THE SUN is also, oddly enough, relatively responsible about showing the toll of its violence.
Constantly surprising and extremely disturbing, this demented exercise in balls-out horror is an early
front-runner for the next AWCM Awards, and highly recommended.
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