Rewind: ‘Fire and Ice’ Review
I recently re-watched and reviewed Hawk the Slayer, which was a fun, albeit utterly flawed piece of silly fantasy flim-flam. It had the sole intention of making money, which seems as likely as someone who goes out and spends all their money on lottery tickets.
None of the building blocks were in place to make a successful film.
Compare it to my reality TV pitch. A bunch of strangers, with no discernible talent or skills, meet on a beach and are given some hours in which to build a working submarine. The parts supplied for the contestants are not those of a submarine (the contestants do not know this). I wish them luck. In their watery tomb.
Fire and Ice was a 1983 film, brought to us by the Fantasy union of the twin towers of director Ralph Bakshi and fantasy art icon Frank Frazetta. Bakshi might not be to everyone’s cup of tea (his take on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings seems decidedly sour), but there can be no denying that there is serious talent behind Fire and Ice. Bakshi was known to use the Rotoscope technique, that is, filming with conventional actors, but then having artists draw over the film, which creates an incredible animated style that can look breathtaking in full flow.
Frank Frazetta’s work is iconic, despite that word being devalued for the last 20 years, the man remains a legend of fantasy art and design. He created countless fantasy works (plus comics). These often let the reader drink deeply from his incredible style and imagine what world this was, who might be the heroes and who might be the villains. He got an incredible amount of information, or inspiration, across in a picture, or a few frames of the comics he worked on. The man had real talent.
Large sections of Fire and Ice work fantastically. The art and “show, don’t tell” world-building work really well. The minimal script and the way the film introduces us to this incredible fantasy world are at times very interesting. I would like to have prints of hundreds of the images on screen across the film. The artistic talent is just off the scale amazing.
The jungle ruins, the horrible leech that attacks one of the baddies, or the giant squid all make for an interesting and believable world. The Rotoscoped action is often impressive in fight and chase scenes. This is, at heart, a high adventure, and when the fight scenes and action set pieces get going, you really can appreciate the natural ability that went into this film, in a way that you simply cannot with Hawk the Slayer. Fire and Ice has some very special people behind it.
The elephant in the room is that one of the greatest strengths of Fire and Ice is likely to also be considered, by modern viewers, to be its Achilles heel. The design style is all big monsters, big muscles, big boobs and tiny pants for all. The filmmakers often find flimsy excuses to make toned bottoms wiggle and writhe. It is gratuitous. It could be seen as a bug or a feature, and if this makes this film a non-starter for you, I get it.
The plot, for what there is is, evil lady, raises evil son. Evil son, Nekron, decides to conquer or kill all the humans (why they might want to do this is not adequately explained). The baddies roll around in their ice castle, with their weird humanoid baddies dropping ice on Heman like people, until they are near the Southern hemisphere, where good King Jarol resides over fire keep. At some point, the character “Darkwolf” turns up, and with very little explanation, starts helping the goodies as apparently he dislikes the baddies. Queue a character that has a “passing resemblance” to Heman, a buxom, nubile Princess (in pants that would be scandalous on Copa Cabana Beach) and Darkwolf running around, saving the world by killing weirdo mutants. If that sounds like fun, it is. Until it runs out of ideas (about 20 minutes into the run time).
While the art from Frank Frazetta is dripping in narrative subtext, it is not dripping with enough to sustain a full-length feature film.
Fire and Ice should have been a stone wall Fantasy action classic, the problem is, the film was never quite ready to be made. The plot and the script are not in a completed state. This film needed 2 more rewrites before they started making it. In its current state, the film quickly ran out of ideas and thus ended up repeating itself to pad the run time. This is one of the few things it has in common with Hawk the Slayer. How many times did Teegra escape the baddies, only to be recaptured?
More time on the script and plot also would have ironed out some of the really silly things that, unfortunately, undercut the incredibly talented people who worked on this film. I am frustrated by Fire and Ice. This should have been an absolute fantasy classic, and instead it’s a curious footnote. A little bit more work, and it could have been a work of art Frank could have been truly proud of. Perhaps it was not until Genndy Tartakovsky’s Prima,l released in 2019, that the full expression of Fire and Ice can be seen. Without any of the caveats.
If anyone remembers Hollyoaks: After Dark. Fire and Ice could have been an after-dark episode of He-Man!
