Honorable Mention (mostly)
Before I get started here, I need to say a few words about Janne Waas.
Janne is perhaps the single best online Science Fiction film critic working today. Perhaps the best in any media for that matter.
He’s trying to write about every major (and minor) science fiction film out there on his site, Scifist 2.0, and is actually watching them in the original order so he can get a better feel for what it would have been like to see them all at the time they came out.
What’s more, his reviews are incredibly detailed and give us reams of information about each film, those involved, and the events leading to its creation.
It’s a degree of obsessiveness the rest of us can only stare at in awe, and you have to remember that anyone who spends his time writing about his favorite movies already has an awe-inspiring level of obsessiveness.
Janne has introduced me to an incredible number of lost or little known — often borderline — films, from the early age of Science Fiction cinema.
Which is another way of saying, it’s his fault I watched this one.
Now I’m not saying I’m blaming him. Red Snow isn’t exactly terrible.
But it is a singularly odd sort of film which really isn’t what it’s trying to tell you it is.
I mean, if you watched the first, oh, ten minutes or so, you’d think this was a tense Cold War thriller about a Soviet secret weapon that could end the world, the tough cocky Captain, his Co-pilot pal, and his comic relief sidekick trying very hard (but not that successfully) to trade the sort of effortless banter you’d find in a Howard Hawks film.
And, oh, yeah, there’s the girl at the base for the hero to have one of those strong man and a strong woman sparring with each other sort of Hollywood romances…
Just like in The Thing.
And, while we’re still watching the first few minutes of that film, we get one of the best moments of this film, as an “Eskimo” soldier on his way back home on leave, stops and watches a remarkable black and white sky show, which comes with a huge roaring sound which, for some reason, gets ignored in the narration.
Ah, but all this is a bait and switch for the real film, which was hinted at in that opening scene. You see, the Inuit soldier in question, Sergeant Koovuk, is played by none other than Ray Mala, a real life Inuit who played a lot of Eskimos and Polynesian natives during his career in Hollywood. He is also wins, for his starring role in Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island, this site’s coveted Gilded memorial Statuette portraying a Cowboy Football player (affectionately known as the “Slinging Sammy”) for being the absolutely worst serial hero in the history of American film.
If you’ve watched as many serials as I have, you know what a remarkable claim that is.
And, before we know it, we’re following Ray as he goes back to his tribe looking for spies and information about that secret weapon.
While doing a lot of very Inuit sort of stuff, like hunting, fishing, marrying the cute girl who is trying very hard to look Eskimo, and covering miles of rough terrain on dog sled.
Now there’s a reason for this: as Janne Waas has documented, this footage came from the following films (and quite possibly more!): Eskimo (1933), the docudrama Igloo (1932) (which both starred Ray as…well, an Eskimo), the second half of SOS Iceberg (1933) and the 1936 drama, Tundra, with stock footage from the 1926 documentary Alaskan Adventures. To make all this even more interesting, Boris Petroff’s first production, before he cobbled Red Snow together out of bits and pieces, was Arctic Fury (1949) which took the main character’s story from Tundra and wrapped a new movie around it. Plus he did the exact same thing in 1950 when he made Two Lost Worlds, using bits and pieces of a lot of essentially incompatible films.
Now there’s a man who found his muse.
Although I have to admit that it is impressive that Ray still matches the footage taken twenty years earlier.
Eventually, after we see a real walrus killed by the natives (and eaten raw, baked, boiled and stewed), a Polar bear hunting Koovuk’s new wife (and speared, again for real), an igloo built, and a wedding ceremony, the film decides it has to do something about that super weapon. We then get an incredibly contrived turn of events which means that Koovuk ends up recovering the bomb and saving the day.
I have to comment on those Russian soldiers: two of them are wearing uniforms which look a bit like the Russian peasant blouses everyone in the Soviet Union had to wear up until the mid-Thirties. I’m not sure whether they are authentic, but they look promising. The highest ranking official, however, shows up wearing what looks like a Nazi Greatcoat and the guy directly below him looks like he just added a big fuzzy hat to a fairly standard looking uniform coat.
But we’re used to Soviet soldiers who look like Nazis in early Fifties films, so I guess they are a little better than average.
There’s a curious moment midway through when we see another big light show (complete with rushing sound, naturally) only to be told that it’s the Americans showing those pesky Ruskies that we have some pretty cool weapons, too.
It’s such an odd moment you figure someone must have insisted on it so audiences wouldn’t get the impression that the Soviets were ahead of us or anything remotely like that!
Now Koovuk narrates the film — which is probably necessary when you’re trying to tie all these bits together, but it is also hard to imagine if you ever heard Ray in that Robinson Crusoe serial. However, it isn’t that awful here: they’ve got someone else doing his voice (in fact, his entire performance may be dubbed).
Which is one of the few things about this production which sounds like a really good idea.
I’ll confess I’m just a bit curious about Renny McEvoy, who plays the comic relief. IMDB has little on him besides his many bit part roles — other than that he’d been in films for over a decade by the time he worked on Red Snow — but the little gag bits he does, pretending to be a Bass Fiddle player or a trombonist with a snowshoe, somehow feels like a Nightclub act — although I’m probably just thinking about the old Bob and Ray bit about the guy who did Food Impressions.
To say the ending feels rushed would be a bit…generous. I have to admit that, if I had a deadly new secret weapon which could wipe out the entire base, I wouldn’t be waving it around and pointing at the trigger. Or telling everyone on the base about it, for that matter.
However, we need the scene so they can try to tie up all the loose ends in the part of the story they’ve hardly bothered to tell us — and try to convince us that the two coldest fish around, playing nurse together, are really a hot couple.
Right.
Look, they really did an amazing job here, taking a pile of random footage and somehow turning it into a second rate B-Movie. There’s a fairly enjoyable man vs. nature film here (SOS Iceberg), an intriguing study of everyday life in a Native culture using their skills to survive in the harshest conditions imaginable (Eskimo, Igloo) and a moderately thrilling Arctic adventure (Tundra).
But we’re not watching any of those films.
The new bits, with those pilots stolen from Howard Hawks, just don’t work at all. And the deadly Soviet weapon sort of…fizzles out (I mean, really, shouldn’t the evil Russian pilot have tried to take it back home and blown the entire program off the map?).
But curiously, the end result is still watchable.
Well, mostly.
And that just leaves us with one more issue we really need to note:
Ray Mala and his bride do not set the screen on fire when they passionately…
Rub noses.
Sigh.
Okay, Janne, you can take this one back…
Please.
(My thanks to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm for making this one available)
rivets on the poster 
Oh, wow, Mark. I dunno what to say, I’m deeply honoured by your very, very kind words. Especially coming from you, whom I consider to be one of the very best online film critics around. Personally, I’m just so extremely happy that there are people out there who take the time to read the loooong film essays that I sneakily call “reviews”. Thanks for the continued support, the interesting discussions and the great reviews, which I always find knowledgeable, balanced and analytical. And I do apologise for leading you down terrible rabbit holes from time to time.
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