ay back in the Dark Ages, an evil wizard named Ambolin tested the loyalty of his apprentice, Abraham (Vivona), by instructing him to kill the woman he loved. Abraham passed the test with flying colors, and Ambolin rewarded him by bringing the apprentice with him to a new realm--a twisted, alternate dimension the wizard had created out of ice from the sun itself. Eventually, it was the apprentice who became the master, but the purpose of the ice realm remained the same--to drag human beings from the real world into it for the purposes of torturing and killing them. But all that's about to change.
Both the angels in heaven (who are fearful) and the devils in hell (who are jealous) want the ice realm's master, now known as The Presence, done away with, but they need a human being to do it. They choose as their holy/unholy avenger, their "assassin," a young woman from the present day with little faith in herself who is ready to give up on life--Alison (Midgett). She is to enter the ice realm along with the next batch of human sacrifices, a group of six friends whose individual failings and fears are going to put them in torment and mortal danger.
And so Alison enters the realm, not even knowing for certain how she's going to destroy The Presence when she finds him. She's been given only two instructions by those who've charged her with this quest--remind The Presence of his humanity, and don't let herself be distracted by the horrors being inflicted on the other human beings around her, no matter how much they appear to suffer. And suffer they do.
The horror ... the horror ...
Eric Stanzee's Ice from the Sun bills itself as "A Dangerously Experimental Punk Art Film." Unfortunately, even this self-description is a bit too generous. There's "experimental" and "punk" and then there's "amateurish," and sadly this film is more accurately described by the latter term than the former two. Whenever Super 8 film stock is combined with an obviously nonprofessional cast of actors, the results are usually pretty rough; add to the mix a script that's in serious need of some editing and the finished product approaches being unwatchable.
One of the primary, fatal flaws of Ice from the Sun may be the fact that it's trying to tell an epic story on what's clearly a very small budget. This film did not need to be 116 minutes long--in fact, it shouldn't have been. The convoluted backstory is like a wordy prologue to a mediocre Dungeons & Dragons module, often revealed in long and awkward voice-over monologues, made even more awful when they're accompanied by nothing more than a single, static image on the screen. The story itself, Ice's plot, is never really developed in a terribly coherent manner, either.
This film is not entirely without merit, however. There are a handful of images that are somewhat interesting and even creepy at times. There are some sequences that are directed fairly well, given the financial and technological limitations under which the filmmakers were working. In a similar vein, a number of the "special effects"(read "gory parts") are also pretty decent. And a good deal of attention appears to have gone into the editing of the film, which can be appealingly sophisticated at times.
Also available from Wicked Pixel is On Thin Ice: The Making of Ice from the Sun, which documents the long and laborious process of making an independent film like Ice. What becomes most evident when viewing this video is how incredibly sincere and earnest all the people involved in making Ice were. So while on the one hand Ice's makers get an "A" for effort, their project may have turned out better if it hadn't taken itself so seriously, if it weren't so wrapped up in its own late-teen/twenty-something angst and horror-S&M pretensions, if it embraced its cheesy and campy potentialities rather than trying to overpower them with such an ambitious production.
