#Mia Farrow does quite all right for most of it but under no circumstances should she have been given a song

[desert-anne]

The Last Unicorn could have been peak movie and lived in my heart right next to Sleeping Beauty if so many of the voice actors hadn't been phoning it in

[mst3kproject]

1103: Avalanche

As I understand it, the point of a disaster movie is the same as that of a slasher, or an episode of reality TV – we’re here to watch terrible things happen to people we either don’t care about or indeed, outright despise.  The same principle lay behind the Roman gladiatorial games, in which prisoners of war were made to fight to the death in a public place – entertainment at the expense of somebody who doesn’t matter.  I guess fiction is the most ethical way to indulge this urge, since it’s the version in which no real people get hurt except maybe a couple of the stunt guys.  Our consciences can take comfort in the fact that they at least got paid.

Now that I’ve said that… is it really worth describing the plot?  As in The Deadly Mantis, who the people are in this movie and what they’re doing is really beside the point… but oh, well.  A woman named Caroline arrives at a ski resort owned by her asshole ex-husband Dave, who is hosting some kind of winter sports competition for its grand opening.  This is vaguely shifty but I don’t know why.  It doesn’t matter anyway because a zillion tons of snow fall on them.  Caroline and Dave survive but she doesn’t take him back. Dave pretends to be sorry he’s such a shifty asshole but never really seems to mean it.  The movie doesn’t so much end as it just loses momentum until it finally gives up.

Avanalche is not a movie that would have ended up on my Episodes that Never Were list, and I think that’s because it’s just not silly enough.  I tend to think of an MST3K-able movie as one that is somehow inherently ridiculous and if you go through the Episodes that Never Were, you’ll find a few like Fiend Without a Face, that got there by virtue of absurdity alone.  Avalanche is more or less about things that could actually happen and presents them in a pretty boring way, and therefore feels rather meh to me.

Make no mistake, though, it is still extremely bad. The scenery is pretty but can’t carry the movie.  Most of the actual avalanche is stock footage, and when they need actors and avalanche in the same shot they composite the latter over the former so badly that I can only pity the poor effects people.  Mia Farrow and Rock Hudson don’t manage to infuse Caroline and Dave with any real life, but the lines they’re given are so dreadful that I want to blame this on the script rather than their acting.  You stifle me – I need my space! is not something that gets blurted out during an argument – it’s something said in a level voice while the marriage counsellor nods approvingly!  Rock Hudson seems to spend most of this movie yelling impotently at people on phones.

As an aside, stage names like ‘Rock Hudson’ and ‘Touch Connors’ always make me wonder – did people call them by those names in casual conversation?  Did co-stars say things like hey, Rock, did you see the script update? and Touch, can I borrow a pen?  Did Dwayne Johnson decide to start using his real name because people called him ‘Rock’ and it was weird?  Did people call Dany Garcia ‘Mrs. Rock’?  I bet Ray Dennis Steckler actually asked people on set to call him ‘Cash’ and they wouldn’t do it because it was stupid.

Back to the movie.  We watch various of the sports events and sometimes what’s going on is kind of impressive, but only if you’re already into things like ski jumping. If you’re not, you’re just watching people you don’t know do the same thing over and over.  The snowmobile race is kind of fun because we get to watch people crash and go flying, but the rest are just dull – as I pointed out in my review of Racket Girls, you can’t get into a fictional contest unless you know the characters enough to know who you want to win.  The bit with the kid dangling from the broken ski lift serves absolutely no purpose except to tug on our heart strings, and it fails precisely because we can see right through that.

The biggest problem with Avalanche, and the number-one reason it’s so damn boring, is the way it treats the people overtaken by its disaster.  Even disaster movies have to be about people, but there’s a right and a wrong way to do it, best illustrated once again by that description of the Jaws franchise: Jaws is a movie about people reacting to a shark, while the sequels are about a shark eating people.  Watching a shark eating people can be fun, particularly if they’re people we hate, like the spider-bait in Giant Spider Invasion, but it doesn’t last.  In a movie called Avalanche we should get to know the characters just well enough to see the changes wrought in them, and how they conform to or deny our expectations, in the desperate circumstances that follow. Instead, Avalanche sets up all these people’s lives and stories outside of the disaster, and then simply leaves them there with no closure because the disaster itself renders closure impossible.

Take the two figure skaters: I think they’re supposed to be rivals and old friends?  Their story is set up for the blonde one to have her big moment in which she finally gets the spin right and her friend applauds her even as it means she loses the contest.  Instead, they both get buried in snow and die.

Take the skier’s affair with the brunette skater. His wife catches him in bed with her and they fight about it the next morning.  We want to see him get punished for his behaviour while she runs back into the arms of the TV reporter who we’re told was her awkward ex-boyfriend.  That would be an end to this story.  Instead, the skier freezes to death, the reporter falls from a ski lift and somehow manages to miss the fireman’s net that was literally right under him, and the wife in a moment of tragic irony is overwhelmed by the avalanche just as she was about to commit suicide anyway (very tasteful, am I right?).

There’s a series of other background stories that go nowhere.  Caroline throws herself at a photographer to make Dave jealous – they both survive but can’t actually get together at the end because it would be weird.  Dave’s Mom hangs out with McDade the accountant and they seem to be falling in love, but then they both die when their ambulance falls into a ravine and explodes!  There’s a few other things that go on with the sports competitions, including the cheating skier trying to break a speed record and a male and female snowmobile racer who hate each other, but none of this matters because none of these stories have an ending!  It’s all just set up to try to make us care when everybody dies, like the brief time we spent getting to know each victim in The Horror of Party Beach.

Disaster movies often try to suggest that the ‘bad’ people in them are being punished for their misbehavior by this outside force. Avalanche does quite a bit with this motif, by trying to make Dave personally responsible for every poor decision that leads up to the catastrophe.  Dave had the trees cut down.  Dave refused to cancel the grand opening despite the weather. Dave insisted that his lawyer or somebody fly in during the fog.  When the plane crashes on the mountain and starts the slide, this is Dave’s fault, and Dave even says so at the end as he and Caroline drink champagne directly from the bottle.

Yet the thing is… it’s not. The plane crash was not inevitable, and even if it were, it wouldn’t automatically cause an avalanche.  All these things could still have happened without producing that result.  If the plane had crashed ten feet to the left there might have been no slide, or it might have missed the resort.  Or none of that could have happened and there could still have been a disaster.  One of the reasons avalanches are so dangerous is because even very tiny things can set one off.  A bear sneezes on a mountaintop and pow!  Your hotel gets buried.  Things could have been done to prevent the situation but they might not have worked.

It’s even dumber to imply that the skier’s hypothermia is his punishment for cheating on his wife.  The two are in no way connected.  In mad science movies, the villain is killed by something they created which is seeking revenge.  In a disaster movie, both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ human characters are caught up in the same events that really have nothing at all to do with their personal decisions. Trying to call this ‘karma’ just makes you wonder about all those nameless people in the stacks of body bags, and what awful things they did that the gods of this universe think they ‘deserve’ this.

The ending sucks, too.  Caroline and Dave basically just stand around and say “well, I guess that happened” and then she leaves. I think we're supposed to be glad they're not getting back together but that really didn't seem like it was gonna happen anyway.  Nothing’s resolved.  Nothing can be resolved when pretty much everybody whose problems we were supposed to be interested in is now dead.

Do you know what this movie needed?  Bigfoot. Bigfoot lurking in the trees to scare people who venture out in the snowstorm.  Bigfoot jumping out of the woods to frighten skiers and snowmobilers into crashing!  And just picture it – at the grand finale, Bigfoot marches in with an army of forest creatures ready to dig the humans out of the mess and save the day!  Out of all the Season Eleven movies not to have Bigfoot in them, why Avalanche when it was clearly the one that needed him most?