MOVIE REVIEW!

Hey all, I figured I might as well christen the blog with my movie review because I made an event of watching this movie last night.

In this review I'll be discussing the 1983 rotoscoped movie "Fire and Ice." You can learn a lot from this flick... about what NOT to do as an entertainer. The movie opens with a cheesy "storybook" explanation of what is happening in the movie's fantasy world. At first I was disappointed that they would resort to giving out their exposition in such a cheap way. But, after watching the whole movie, I figured out why they did it: It is because there is no other point in the entire movie that gives any indication as to what the heck is going on.

Anyway, after the "book" sequence, we get an eyeful of really ugly, sketchy animation that is trying too hard to be "He-Man." We are first introduced to the main bad guy through a series of weird, homoerotic gestures. Let me elaborate. This guy -- Nekron -- is apparently using his psychic powers to cause glaciers to destroy the land. The movie cuts back and forth between explosions of ice and Nekron's eerily orgasmic facial expressions. This method could work in theory; I do like that they weaved the two things together to explain what was happening. But at the same time it was painful to watch.

With this scene out of the way, the movie just catapults into chaos, where character and plot are rarely given any thought. And when the creators DO remember that yes, this movie is supposed to be going somewhere, they awkwardly stuff in some bad dialogue that still doesn't really clear up any confusion. They also attempt to use foreshadowing a few times, and it is a failure: they simply take clips from future scenes and stick them in randomly.

So, onto the specifics of the story, or lack thereof. There is a lot of running and fighting, but I do not understand WHY. Most of the movie is scene after scene of cavemen chasing both a beautiful princess and a two-dimensional "hero." The princess' scenes are a joke; everything is overshadowed by blatant and unnecessary sexuality. For example, while trying to escape from the cavemen, she decides to get into the water and touch herself to get them aroused. Now, I ask you, why would a female -- especially one as pathetically weak as this princess -- give her pursuers even more of a reason to chase her? The answer is: the creators wanted an excuse to draw nipples.

Of course, those two main characters eventually meet and instantly fall in love. There's no character development of any sort, they just run into each other and decide they're soul mates. No one in this movie has any sort of motivation, there is just "bad for the sake of bad" and "good for the sake of contrast." Halfway through, I still was unsure what was driving the movie. The conflict between good and evil amounts to little more than pointless chase scenes, and the romance is tacked on unceremoniously. Basically, it was like they had five minutes worth of story and stretched it to an hour and a half.

When the main conflict of the movie -- Nekron vs. the hero -- FINALLY comes to a head, it is poorly introduced and poorly executed, just like everything else. Nekron apparently has the ability to control his enemies and make them kill themselves, although this was never referenced before at all. It is also not explained how the heroes resist this magic.

In the end, it was just a tired, predictable story -- nay, it was the mere skeleton of a story. I just wanted it to end. I don't think I  could sit through this a second time, even for comedy's sake. The faceless characters, the sorry plot, the shoddy animation... it was painful. Stay far away from this movie.