OUT COLD

Directed by The Malloys

Starring Jason London and Zach Galifianakis

Playing at Cinemark 12 in Hadley

Out Cold, your basic hijinxs-in-the-snow madcap comedy, is everything you expect from the trailer: dumb, crass and unlikely to further the art of cinema. It’s a movie about drunken carousing on the slopes, reminiscent of `80s teen films Hot Dog…The Movie and Ski School (not to mention early John Cusack vehicles like Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer). But with lowered expectations come lowered defenses, defenses that Out Cold attacks vigorously. The movie is funny, in that “stoo-pid,” brow-lowering sort of way. In a year of the senseless, awful, gross-out comedy (from the repugnant Tomcats to the lame Corky Romano), Out Cold ranks as one of the few lowbrow comedies – along with Rob Schneider’s endearingly goofy The Animal – that remembers to tickle the funny bone rather than the gag reflex.

Directed with no particular flair by Brendan and Emmott Malloy (music video vets who are credited as “the Malloys”) and written by Jon Zack, the movie plays like one of those videos shown at snowboard shops padded out with a minimal plot. Half the movie consists of real life snowboarders doing what they do best. There’s even a montage over the end credits showing the `boarders wiping out. The stunts are admittedly amazing, but it’s like watching the ESPN X-Games on the big screen.

Bull Mountain was founded by the late and beloved Papa Muntz (he died skiing backwards downhill, trousers dropped and beer in hand) as a place to party and have fun. The locals even go by the motto “Don’t Go Changin’.” Now, however, Muntz’ wimpy son is planning to sell the mountain to developer John Majors (the Six Million Dollar Man himself, Lee Majors, looking like he needed the paycheck). Majors is a good-ol’ boy who plans to yuppify the area, turning it into another Vail or Aspen. Some of the local employees (who drink and snowboard more than they work) won’t let Bull Mountain change without a fight.

The movie focuses on this motley crew of goofballs. Their leader is nice guy Rick Rambus (Jason London), who’s still pining for his one true love Anna (Caroline Dhavernas), a French girl he met while in Cancun. But he’s also started flirting with Jenny (A.J. Cook), a cute snowboarder who hangs with the guys. Things get complicated for Rick when Majors shows up and brings his daughters – one of whom is Anna, now engaged to an ex-extreme snowboarder/doctor/pilot, who is handicapped. Meanwhile, Rick’s friends get into a series of misadventures, mostly while getting drunk or trying to get in bed with Majors’ other daughter, a Swede named Inga, played by 1997 Playboy Playmate of the Year Victoria Silvstedht. Of course there would be a Playboy Playmate in this movie.

Out Cold seems to be replicating the formula for the American Pie movies, keeping the body fluid jokes to a minimum while upping the antics centered on sex. There are key moments involving an amorous polar bear and a man getting, um, stuck in the jet of a whirlpool. A guy chugs bong water, and there are the requisite (and unfunny) jokes centered on defecation and farting. How this movie got a PG-13 instead of an R is beyond me. Maybe the fine line is in the showing of nudity, since this movie has all the earmarks of a teen sex comedy except the bare breasts. That’s Hollywood for you.

But the movie is funny, sometimes side-splittingly so. Technically, the movie is no great shakes. The Malloys use the overdone tactic of ladling on a punk and pop-rock soundtrack. The plot comes by in fits and starts; the filmmakers don’t so much as advance it, instead throwing out a few kernels between jokes. But I’ll say it again: the movie is funny.

Hipsters be damned. Out Cold is check-your-brain-at-the-door funny. In a year of tired, laughless “comedies”, that’s all you can really ask for.