 |
 Supposedly this is an "animated adventure film." Also supposedly, Ralph Bakshi
and Frank Frazetta are "masters of fantasy and animation." There is a guy
named Nekron who is an "evil Ice Lord" and is destroying villages. Larn is a
guy that survives and swears revenge. Teegra is a gal who is the daughter of
King Jarol, who is one of those good kings. She gets abducted by Nekron's
"subhuman, ape-like creatures." Larn goes to find her and the result is "a
tense animated battle between good and evil, surrounded by the mystical
elements of the ancient past!" 1983, 81 minutes, VHS
Ralph Bakshi, whose claim to immortality is that he brought underground comics
to the big screen with Fritz the Cat, proving that animated characters could be just as crude and un-American as
all the ingrate kids of those days, teamed up with Frank Frazetta, whose claim
to fame is that he can paint barbarians really well, to weave the derivative
and utterly uninteresting tale of a guy named Larn (a name that only exists in
that strange sword-and-sorcery milieu that produces such names as Dar, Ator,
and Gor) who chases after a scantily clad princess, befriends a mysterious
ax-wielding warrior, and battles some dude with peroxided hair. I suppose that
this movie is aimed at the same 13 year old audience that thought Heavy Metal was cool (They swear, show gore, and naked chicks - and it's a cartoon!). You
know, I had a roommate back in the day, and he and I went to this midnight
showing of Heavy Metal. I remember sitting there wondering what was so great
about a disjointed story interrupted by out of place rock music every five
minutes. My roommate left the movie thinking that it was some kind of
revelation and was really pissed that I dared to "inform" him what a piece of
overrated trash it was. He also thought The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was spectacular comedy, so you can imagine that the MonsterHunter and he
weren't roommates too long after that. I think he also gave thumbs up to the
Martin Short - Kurt Russell hernia, Captain Ron, but that might be me just wishing it so he looks even stupider. I mean,
really, how could anyone stomach that? It starred Martin Short!  Okay, now Fire and Ice gets off to a rickety start, by showing us some of
Frazetta's sketches. I'm not trying to say the guy can't draw, it's obvious
that he can, but I paid my money to see a cartoon and they're starting me off
with some pencil drawings! Let's get it going here! All the while they're
giving me this, we have to endure this voice over which is designed to explain
this ridiculous and entirely fake-feeling world we're investing the next hour
and twenty minutes of our lives in. I'm listening to this dude drone on and on
about some evil broad (really?) who somehow had a son (you don't say) and she
taught him the black arts (good to have something to fall back on) and this
dude uses it freeze stuff (brrrrr) and there's also a good king (well, duh)
and he's got a daughter (uh-oh) and on and on until Frank Frazetta gets tired
of providing sketches to these leeches and tells them to start animating
already. Eventually we determine that this Nekron has this power to make
glaciers move all over and lives in some hotel called Ice Point. Meanwhile,
the good (read: wuss) Jarol, his daughter, Teegra (or as the guys in Shop class
call her T-and-A-gra), and Jarol's son, whose name escapes me, but resembles
Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galatica (not Survivor!) live in a little place they call Fire Keep and Jarol apparently has a bunch
of lava he can let loose whenever he has enough Taco Bell. The problem is that
Nekron has been using his freezing powers for evil, forcing all the heat-loving
humans south while his armies of cavemen run around harassing people, even as
the glaciers begin to freeze everything. One of the things getting frozen is
Larn's village. Larn as you can guess by his tight loin cloth and long blonde
hair is our hero. His heroism is marked by his apparent lack of interest in
vocal communication and his technique of playing possum whenever the enemy is
close by. He just lies down, closes his eyes real tight and waits til these
ape-guys have their back turned and then Whammo! He also is wearing earrings
which made me think he was He-Man's liberated brother or something. Larn
spends a lot of time running away, climbing trees, and falling down. You're
not really rooting for him, so much as applauding him for being so open about
his, um, ambiguousness.  While Larn is prancing about the forest in search of some self-actualization,
King Jarol is busy getting punked back at Fire Keep. Some of Nekron's boys
show up with a peace proposal and end up kidnapping Jerol's daughter Teegra.
She's a fairly sickening character. She lounges around in this microscopic
cellophane bikini and the filmmakers try to pose her suggestively every chance
they get, but the animation is so awful, it either makes her look fat or like
her legs are too short for the rest of her improbably proportioned bod. What
kind of movie succeeds in making a cartoon chick look like she's got cottage
cheese on her thighs? Since she's kidnapped, her brother implores the good
king to do something, but since you and I know that good kings are good
precisely because they never do anything mean, he just decides they'll wait and
maybe some weird blonde dude with a stupid name will step up and rescue her,
destroy Nekron and save civilization. So Teegra escapes her captors and manages
to avoid some nasty monsters and runs into Larn at some old ruins. They
spend about one minute getting to know one another and eventually Larn
starts screwing around (ADHD) and knocks them both into the lake or river or
whatever
that's nearby. They next thing you know, Larn is throwing a spear into the eye
of a giant squid and getting thrown through the air to some distant shore,
while Teegra is getting herself re-captured at the other end. Larn is nursed
back to health by a mysterious warrior called something stupid like Darkwolf or
Knightrider or something. This guy runs around with this wolf-like mask and
really husky voice, muttering things like, "don't go looking for death, it
finds us all soon enough." One interesting thing about this guy is that part
of nursing Larn back to health involved him tying Larn up with leather straps
so he wouldn't hurt himself or something. Riiiiight. Gets pretty lonely in
those old ruins, I hear. PapaBear or Darkwolf or whoever says he's going after
Nekron (why is never explained, but I'm guessing old boyfriend or something)
and Larn wants to find Teegra (How many brothers do you have, Teegra?) so we
get some more search and rescue action. Somehow, Teegra escapes these ape-men again, but falls off a cliff and knocks
herself out. Meanwhile, Larn and SuperTramp are battling these creatures in an
effort to find her. By the way, I should mention that their big battle plan to
fight these things is to stand on higher ground and throw big rocks at them.
Luckily for them, these knuckledraggers just stand there and watch the
boulders come down and smash them across their gigantic foreheads. I love it
when a plan comes together! The only hitch with this here plan is that it
doesn't really address the twin aims of finding the escape-prone Teegra and
stopping Nekron. So BlackAdder tells Larn to go find Teegra while he holds off
the cavemen. I think this must be when I got up and got some Cheesy Pasta that
my girlfriend made the other day. I forgot the tuna so she just made it
without, resulting in a really jacked up version of macaroni and cheese. Good
times, great food. I get sleepy trying to remember what happened in this
movie, so I'll skip to the end, and tell you that I think Teegra escaped, got
captured by a witch, was taken prisoner, and then rescued by Larn who stowed
away on a boat carrying Teegra's brother (howdy sailor!) who got himself killed
by Nekron. There's a climatic final battle, but not between Larn and Nekron,
but between Nekron and his ex-boyfriend Darkwolf. Darkwolf kills Nekron, Jarol
lets loose with the lava, and Larn and Teegra hug. Huh? What kind of ending
is that? What was the point of us following the trials and tribulations of
Teegra and Larn? Who was Darkwolf and what was his beef with Nekron and why
did he have the power to beat Nekron and why didn't he use it before? I
actually don't really care about the answers to any of those questions as this
movie contained nothing approaching characterization, unless you count the
fact that Nekron hated his mother as well as everyone else.  I must confess that I've never really seen the appeal of these Conan-style
movies, with their wizards that seem to have powers with no real defined
parameters and the heroes that seem to be as smart as the hunk of metal the
inevitably wield successfully against their far more powerful foes. The women
in these affairs likewise seem to be cut from the same busty cloth and exist
solely to feed the schoolboy fantasies of the freaks who like this stuff. But
even considering that, this movie still stinks it up within its own stank
genre. These people don't do anything remotely interesting in this film. They
just run around escaping and getting caught until they show up at the bad guy's
house and whup him. The only person outside of the love interest our hero
meets is Darkwolf. Larn doesn't even have an animal sidekick to provide comic
relief! But what about the animation you say? That's pretty cool right? Uh,
it's actually kind of squirrelly. It seems that Bakshi used some process called
Rotoscoping or Roto Rooter or something where he films real people running
around
then draws pictures over top of them and animates those drawings. What's the
point of that? If you're going to go to the trouble of actually filming live
actors, just make a regular movie! The animation in this movie certainly
wasn't used to any great effect. It didn't bring a different world to life or
anything. It didn't allow the filmmakers to do anything that couldn't have
been accomplished by a film crew going out to the state park which is five
miles away from my trailer park. Maybe if the story had been more than the
most rote good and evil (can you get any more rote than fire and ice?) gimmick,
the bland animation could be overlooked, but this movie is about as dull to
look at as an episode of Thundarr the Barbarian and a lot less interesting. Comic book scribes Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway
didn't do themselves any favors with this script and one hopes that it was
Bakshi that made it so dumbed-down and forgettable, especially since Thomas
wrote
so many issues of Conan for Marvel Comics, among many others and thus should have been well versed in
how to tell an interesting story of this type. If my ex-roommate is
out there reading this, drop me a line and I'll polish up my copy of Fire and
Ice real good
and send it to you. Sideways.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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