Jay Rohr
Ice from the Sun makes me want to visit Australia. Specifically, Melbourne, to hit up an annual event known as the Museum of Particularly Bad Art. There to escape from the seriousness most artists oversaturate their work with and revel in the freedom of “mediocrity, in all its gruesome glory.” Granted, that sounds more mocking than celebratory. However, for all the ways Ice from the Sun fails, it soars in odd regards worth acknowledging.
The movie comes from writer-director Eric Stanze. It revolves around six people sucked into another dimension by The Presence (D. J. Vivona). This cruel wizard inhabits a hellish realm encased in ice where he tortures people, gaining power from their suffering. Angels and devils, fearful of his growing mystical strength, recruit Alison (Ramona Midgett) to remind this evil entity of his humanity. By doing so, the ice preventing them from accessing his realm will melt, allowing them a chance to destroy him.
Critic Stephen Holden called the story, “an impenetrable quasi-religious sci-fi allegory involving angels and wizards and the snatching of humans from the earth into another dimension, where they are imprisoned and tortured by an evil force.”
The main plot is delivered through a mind-bogglingly dull exposition dump. However, without this tedious monologue there’d be no discerning what is going on. This comes long after a prolonged opening that tells the viewer absolutely nothing.
On the one hand, the uninformative opening is a clever risk. Audiences aren’t spoon fed any details, and if intrigued by the violent, bloody beginning, they may look forward to seeing how it all fits together. The opening of The Matrix (1999) explained nothing, and sadly, contemporary audiences typically don’t have the luxury of being delightfully unaware where the film is leading. Other movies have similarly succeeded with such ambiguity: Primer (2004), Donnie Darko (2001), Holy Motors (2012). Not everything needs to make sense straight away, but Ice from the Sun stumbles when it tries to pull things together. Instead of dripping details which add to the whole, the entire plot is spelled out in a snooze inducing portion that’s more invitation to use the bathroom than something captivating.
It’s a reminder that knowing the formula for films doesn’t necessarily preclude proper execution. The plot of Ice from the Sun isn’t the problem so much as the way it comes across. In many ways, it bears a tangential resemblance to Hellraiser (1987). Yet, Ice from the Sun lacks that sense of horrifying revelation as things unfold.
The main series of events involves torturous surreal encounters The Presence produces through mystical means. Essentially, his victims must endure a hell of their own making which often end in bloody outcomes. There’s nothing new to that concept. It’s been seen in films as varied as L’Inferno (1911), What Dreams May Come (1998), The Cell (2000), and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). The flaw here is presentation. Gore by itself is not enough to be compelling, it requires a certain stylization to be captivating, while weird imagery easily strays into pretentious mimicry.
Wandering the bizarre realm, Alison passes someone in a ruined room struggling to decide which typewriter keys to hammer. There’s a certain Eraserhead (1978) aura to the scene as well as several others. Yet, Ice from the Sun lacks the ethereal oddity of that film causing most of these efforts to come across offkey. It’s like listening to someone play a progressive rock song who hits all the right notes but not in the right time signature. Close as it sounds there’s something definitely off.
Although shot entirely on Super 8 film, the movie looks like a bad VHS bootleg. Perhaps meant to suggest the distorted reality the victims enter the cinematography certainly seems like a choice. That may be why the 2000 Syracuse International Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival awarded Ice from the Sun Best Cinematography. There’s certainly the sense of an honest effort to craft intriguing visuals, but it’s nowhere near the gifted stylization in Six-String Samurai.
Stanze peppers the film with odd angles, visual distortions, shaky cam, and inverted colors. Though their purpose is obvious, there effectiveness is less so. Cinematic flair doesn’t always add to a film. Sometimes it’s okay to simply shoot a static shot. Consequently, Ice from the Sun often seems like a showreel featuring visual experiments by an aspiring auteur.
To be fair, these work during certain segments of the film. The opening as well as one of the torture encounters come across as music videos surprisingly indicative of the time. They remind me particularly of vids for songs like “Grey Flap” by Pist.On and “Drive Boy, Shooting” by g//z/r (a.k.a. GZR) that I’d catch on public access shows such as JBTV. Grainy, low-quality videos that work surprisingly well within their musical context. If Eric Stanze used Ice from the Sun as a sizzle reel, it’d be easy to see someone in the late 90s hiring him for a music video.
The soundtrack clearly speaks to the filmmakers’ desire for evocative tunes. That said, Ice from the Sun inadvertently asks if a needle drop necessarily needs to come from someone famous. Obviously, there’s a benefit to using well-known music. However, time has interesting consequences for art. While no one on the official soundtrack is necessarily famous, the feel of the music here is solidly representative of 90s trends making these needle drops oddly nostalgic. The titular track by Godf*ck reminds of industrial rock bands like My Life with the Thrill Kill featured in The Crow (1994), while Johnny Magnet has that punk revival, alternative pop/rock essence of NY Loose and PJ Harvey.
From the soundtrack to the visual aesthetics, it’s easy to see how Ice from the Sun is the byproduct of its era rather than an avant-garde innovation. Although it has the trappings of experimental filmmaking, these elements are all borrowed from other movies without improvement or expert execution. The movie is more Icarus than Eraserhead, especially as it tries to tackle serious issues.
When Robin Wood wrote the essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” he “introduced the now-familiar idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, that scary movies provide a valuable window onto what our society ‘represses or oppresses.’”
Consider, at one point a sexually abused character, being tortured by recollections of her incestuous assaults, transforms into a human-dog hybrid. One suspects some kind of meaningful metaphor about feeling like a freak is intended by this torment. Such intentions aside, it does strike me as being in poor taste. Besides the suffering induced by reliving a horrible event, it doesn’t seem to say anything other than the staggeringly obvious fact sexual assault survivors don’t, for lack of a less sarcastic term, enjoy their abuse. In other words, why torture a rape victim when a rapist is more deserving?
J. Jack Halberstam put forth the argument in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters that Dracula, the novel and arguably by extension its various cinematic adaptations, features a vampire that “exhibits all the stereotyping of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism.” This is predicated on the notion that “fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals.” Consequently, art is often bound, even if unintentionally, by the present it inhabits.
Notions about how to depict sexual trauma have changed radically over the last few decades. For instance, the rape-and-revenge flick has evolved from the exploitative I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to the award-winning Promising Young Woman (2020), while remaining about the same themes. Increased sensitivity surrounding the subject of sexual abuse has changed the way it’s depicted. As such, the clumsy, shock driven presentation in Ice from the Sun is indicative of the past. At best, it was a poorly executed surreal metaphor regarding the hidden suffering sexual assault survivors endure. At worst, it’s a historical artifact reminding others not to make the same mistake. Set on a spectrum, it’s both.
Independent horror flicks are littered with such examples of poorly executed shock. Hate Crime (2013) features meth-fueled neo-Nazis assaulting a Jewish family in myriad appalling ways. The British Board of Film Classification found “that the unremitting manner in which Hate Crime focuses on physical and sexual abuse, aggravated by racist invective, means that to issue a classification to this work, even if confined to adults… would be unacceptable to broad public opinion.” In other words, these depictions serve no broadening understanding of the abuses on display.
Yet, filmmaker James Cullen Bressack insists that, “As a Jewish man, and a victim of anti -Semitic hate, I made a horror film that depicts the very thing that haunts my dreams.”
Speaking similarly, in an interview Eric Stanze observed it’s, “Interesting how creating and submerging yourself in a nightmare can bring you so much calm and clarity, like the beautiful weather that follows a violent and destructive storm.”
It’s a shame this artwork doesn’t share that clarity when it comes to expression. For instance, Ice from the Sun includes a scene where a woman is chained to the back of a car then dragged down a gravel road until she’s a bloody mess. The point is hard to nail down. It reminds of gory flicks like The Burning Moon (1992) or the recent Terrifier franchise which seem to have stories but are just vehicles for relentless shocking grotesquery. And unfortunately, Ice from the Sun lacks the budget necessary to do anything truly extreme in a visually satisfying way. It struggles to imply epic gore it can’t afford.
Meanwhile, the less said about the acting in Ice from the Sun the better. It isn’t bad, so much as nonexistent. Still, low budget productions must often resort to hiring anyone willing, who may not be experienced performers. Something highlighted in features such as American Movie (1999), a documentary about Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank putting together the independent horror short Coven (1997) which mostly stars family and friends. But that can pay off. Kevin Smith certainly squeezed more than one might expect out of Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson in Clerks (1994). Although Ice from the Sun seems closer to Coven than Clerks, in quality and renown, Stanze took an understandable risk hiring the cast he did to get the project done — better finished than never filmed.
And that’s where his movie starts to standout. It’s easy to point out the flaws of this feature. Yet, it’s difficult to deny the passion necessary to make it a reality. Digital technology has made filmmaking so accessible these days, folks below a certain age could be forgiven for not appreciating the effort it took to film anything like this twenty-five years ago. Despite how it looks, Ice from the Sun isn’t something someone shot over a weekend on a whim.
Granted, it’s a child only its parents can be proud of, but there’s no reason they shouldn’t be, even if they’re alone in that pride. The movie has a tiny niche of fans. Some festivals found it worthy of award. It certainly helped launch Eric Stanze’s 25-year-long career. Not only is he still making films, but it’s clear even by just observing trailers he’s refined his cinematic style into something more palatable without losing the essence of his artistic expression. The same use of disorienting angles, utilized with excess and imperfection in Ice from the Sun, is better employed in the film In Memory Of (2018). Meanwhile, he hasn’t lost his intention of exploring catharsis through horror.
Bad art is easy, sometimes fun to criticize, yet at its core is something very telling. What mediocrity tries to imitate indirectly says something about what society values. Observing it can heighten an appreciation of better art, but also runs the risk of revealing imperfections hidden by artistic flair. (Was a movie clever or did it just look cool?) Ice from the Sun may not be a great film; however, it does say a lot about what kind of horror certain audiences are looking for, fantastical experimental gore.
