This one's a stinker. And trust me, I love stinky movies. The junkier the better, usually, but this film holds the distinction in my opinion as super DUPER atrocious. Almost as bad as A Vacation In Hell, but not quite. There's a shred of something interesting here, but for all the wrong reasons, of course. It has well known TV performers of the day. This is good only if you enjoy shows like The Love Boat, the charms of which, I can certainly appreciate. The action takes place at Banff, but they call the town Silver City. Deborah Raffin plays the lead character modeled after Suzy Chaffee. A fictional freestyle skier, she's come to this fictional town for a fictional competition. Howard Duff and Don Johnson and Clu Gulager are in it. She is romanced by a handsome male colleague skiier, with a few quick and creepy facial mastication-style makeout scenes.
There's some fun footage of people flipping moguls and doing high jumps at the snow skiing competition, featuring the real Suzy Chaffee acting as Deborah Raffin's body double in a beautiful and well executed ski routine--just one of several unrelated yet formulaic plot machinations.
A gunman is hired to kill Howard Duff's character. There's tons of male chauvinism. There's a ski lodge T-shirt/boobie contest with extensive footage of women gyrating and men going hubba hubba. Tacky behavior like you'd see at a strip club. Veronica Hamel's character is shown sleeping with a married man, "who was only lying." Once the disaster finally happened in the last hour, there was really no point for the movie to continue, but it did. And that's when I realized it was gratuitous and manipulative from start to finish. And I'm not saying that like it is a bad thing, but ooh, this movie is a stinker! The other, very telling factor here is this DVD came from Netflix, yet it is a copy of something taped on a vcr from a TV broadcast. The quality is very poor and it is glaring. The opening credits are missing and there are very obvious artifacts like vcr stripes and color bars and jumps and volume issues. Was this the only surviving master copy, perhaps something Suzy Chafee may have taped on her own vcr?
