Out Cold
review by Elias Savada, 30 November 2001

The influenza season has just started, but even if you've got a flu shot your very much susceptible to eighty-nine minutes of dreadful aches, excruciating groans, and other tasteless duress permeating theaters nationwide, particularly those screens offering up the left-over pickings of the new lame "ensemble comedy" Out Cold. How appropriate this overcooked turkey opened over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend! And I'm here to give it a basting. If you're tempted enough by the yuk-yuk stoogean premise and cast to venture into this puerile sickness, you can masturbaste yourself as well.

For eighty-nine dreary minutes you can hear the audience howling in anguish at this pointless muddle that jumbles the worst of Porky's elevated male testosterone level, an old-fashioned scenic travelogue, a silly script by Jon Zack, twenty-eight musical selections ("The better to sell more CDs", says the Big Bad Wolf) and the voluptuous assets of Victoria Silvstedt, a.k.a. Playboy Magazine Playmate of the Year in 1997. As pedantically directed by The Malloys, the producers apparently picked the pair because of their two surf documentaries, Thicker Than Water and The September Sessions. That other sibling directing teams, the Farrellys, the Coens, the Hughes, and the Wachowski, need not be worried by Hollywood's latest frères Brendan and Emmett, as their debut feature (after a successful career as music video directors/producers for the likes of Blink 182 and Limp Bizkit) will quickly melt into home video oblivion. Distributor Touchstone Pictures would be better off burying the negative under a ten-foot snow drift. One hopes this Disney offshoot is just biding its time awaiting the forthcoming Cuba Gooding's dogsled comedy Snow Dogs. Unfortunately they let the dog out with Out Cold when it should have been kenneled straight to cable or video.

The "big name" cast of co-starring snow dudes is headed by Lee Majors, TV's Six Million Dollar Man, he of the William Shatner school of thespian talent, and Jason London (twin brother of Party of Five's Jeremy London). Majors creaks through the role of cowboy ski mogul John Majors, anxious to scoop up the backsnow town at the foot of Alaska's Bull Mountain and supersize it into the next Aspen, able to sell tall $4 cups of vanilla latté in a single bound. The sale of the peak by dimwitted Ted Muntz (Willie Garson), whose father stole it from the Eskimos, depends very much on how many times he can stand Majors calling him a retard.

As that breaking point takes about the whole film, it's left to pretty boy Rick Rambis (London) and his band of pot-smoking, beer-drinking buddies to come to the aid of their community. And how exactly do Rick, Luke (Zach Galifiankis), Anthony (Flex Alexander), and Pig Pen (Derek Hamilton) do that? By partying at El Matador, their local hangout, witlessly snowboarding down the hill in a no-rules beer-glass competition, and subscribing to shameless roadrunner pranks on each other. These horny guys sample ample T+A, and  are especially oogle-eyed of the bodacious Inga (Silvstedt), Majors' daughter. There's actually a coincidental subplot involved a pre-existing "thing" between Inga's demure stepsister Anna (Caroline Dhavernas) and Rick, which puts off Jenny (A.J. Cook), the proverbial girl-next-door. There are fantasies featuring a bevy of buxom beauties caught in a topless cable car tragedy filled with double entendres. And moments of purely sick humor, when Luke's privates are sucked up in Majors' outdoor hot tub.

There is nothing to laugh at in this gross-out, flatulence-filled snowball comedy. It's lamentable that the only giggles anyone will remotely experience from this frozen slapstick Popsicle are the end credit outtakes, as Out Cold will have wiped out long before those final few chuckles. Ugh.

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