Well, they're not all going to be as good as "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain."
If nothing else, "Snowboard Academy" earns the distinction of being the dirtiest-looking film ever filmed in blinding fucking sunlight on a ski slope. The entire thing looks greasy, dim, barely in focus - and before I begin talking about where "Snowboard Academy" went wrong, I ought to at least give them credit where credit's due. It takes a special kind of skill to make a movie look this unsightly.
The plot is almost an afterthought in a movie this half-assed, but I'll give it a shot. Corey Haim, looking like Brad Renfro after a heroin bust and in dire need of a highlight touchup, plays a cocky snowboarder who makes - and then breaks - his own rules. His strait-laced brother, played by some idiot whose agent should have known better, is the general manager of the ski resort, and resents his brother's no-good snowboarder friends. Haim and his buddies, in turn, seem to treat this as a rich snobby kid vs. scrappy snowboard punk situation, even though the leader of the ski gang and the snowboard gang are brothers, and everyone in the film seems to be equipped with incredibly expensive arctic survival gear and very shiny brand-name snowboards. Their father, played by Joe Flaherty with a permanent look of dread etched upon his face, keeps trying to mediate the situation when he isn't distracted by the spectral visage of his wife, Brigitte Nielsen, constantly swilling vodka in an underlit bar, and seemingly unable to decide from which Eastern Bloc country she should purport to be when refusing to divorce Flaherty, which she does like a dozen times in an hour and a half. Fall of the Iron Curtain or not, perhaps a loveless marriage to the owner of a failing ski hill is a real item of allure compared to whatever awaits her back in Dnipropetrovsk.
And then there's Jim Varney1, around whose shtick this movie basically exists as a rocketsled to infamy, and yet who's entirely inessential to the aforementioned goings-on. Hired despite his near-total lack of qualifications to provide cabaret-style entertainment and supervise mountain safety, Varney spends most of the movie trapped in a rickety lookout tower, and it's a testament to the power of bad movies that this one manages to steamroll on without its putative star really having to interact with anybody other than Joe Flaherty. At one point Varney yodels while reading announcements over the lookout tower's PA system, and by the aggressively pained reactions of the skiers within earshot, you'd think they'd found themselves transported to the front row of a Mindflayer show. That's a hell of a yodel.
Despite his repeated soliliquys, Varney manages to set himself on fire, be nearly dragged to death by a Skidoo, be run over by a slope-grooming machine, fall down several mountains, snowboard while (literally) handling a (literally) ticking time bomb, and coo over the Bedazzler more than a roomful of soccer moms at a Pampered Chef party. Varney actually uses the Bedazzler as the focus of a stand-up routine at one point during this movie. Multiple characters wear hastily rhinestone-encrusted articles of clothing. During the credits, just as you've convinced yourself it's all a bad coincidence, there it is:
THE PRODUCERS WOULD LIKE TO THANK: THE BEDAZZLER.
It's product placement so blatant to make the creators of "Mac and Me" weep. Well played, "Snowboard Academy."
Anyway. Haim and his brother are at loggerheads over allowing snowboarders to traverse the hills; rather than settle the situation by realizing that it's NINETEEN FUCKING NINETY-SIX and "snowboarding's in the OIympics" (sic), Flaherty chooses to wager thousands of dollars of revenue on some sort of unspecified skier vs. snowboarder race, in which World Cup skiers will do battle with a Japanese caricature2 who learned to snowboard not fifteen minutes ago and a Shaggy-esque stoner caricature whose bro-speak is usually subtitled, in what this movie hopes will register with its hollow-eyed audience as a running gag.
Wild fucking guess who wins.
This despite the saboteurial machinations of Brigitte Nielsen and the recently-deposed safety supervisor, a none-too-crafty French-Canadian who looks startlingly like Carlos D from Interpol. At one point early on, Carlos macks on a female skier with an implausibly large booger hanging on his upper lip; the movie's first attempt at a joke is his mishearing of the phrase, "No...it's snot." Screenwriters Rudy Rupak and James Salisto certainly love puns; if it isn't Corey Haim's evil brother using the CB alias "Head Cheese," it's a heavily accented female tourist brightly asking directions to Mount Happiness: "I want to go mount...a penis!" Snow bunny knows the troubles I've seen, indeed.
Given the preponderance of surf guitar licks, rim shots, canned applause, bass zippers, "Hey Dude"-style riffs, and the bowling pin sound that accompanies the shot of a snowboarder being blindsided by a giant snowball being used as a weapon by Carlos D3, it's apparent that "Snowboard Academy's" sound designer had access only to a Mel Waldorf best-of and a copy of "101 Wacky Royalty-Free Sound Effects" when doing post-production work. It bears mentioning that these effects are an improvement over the movie's actual soundtrack listing, most of which appears to have been handled by a band called Fuzz Aldrin. (Of fucking course Fuzz Aldrin is a band from Quebec; in fact, most of the extras and much of the cast speaks with incomprehensibly thick French-Canadian accents, or at least in simulacra of what the Quebecois think American ski bums sound like. Lots of guys yelling, "Yippee!" when doing seriously unimpressive big-air 180s on a hastily-constructed halfpipe, in other words.)
Attempting to describe every actor's function in this plot is almost impossible. It looks like it was cold as fuck, this being filmed at Mont Tremblant and all, and in a movie with so many nameless minor characters who vaguely resemble each other, the parkas, goggles, and toques only serve to confuse. And yet, there's something oddly refreshing about the fact that this is one of those movies that attempts to shoehorn twenty actors into a plotline that'd be overly convoluted if there were three of them. It finds time for the construction of something called a "Babesicle" and a long shot of a pretty female snowboarder's reputedly shapely ass (albeit concealed beneath layers of arctic survival gear). And it isn't above a tacked-on subplot involving an insurance inspector who gets stuck on a broken ski lift with Flaherty while snowboarders manage to make it up the hill without much difficulty between runs, or giving a great deal of screen time to a mustachioed sysadmin-type who's one pair of zippered pants away from a gig at the Electronic Frontier Foundation; even though he's clearly got a Snorlax somewhere to level up, he spends his days tending the dankest, loneliest bar in rural Quebec, his only jollies coming from skimming loonies from a Save the Whales jar and pouring Brigitte Nielsen a "double wodka" that's been soaking in Jim Varney's Bedazzled sleeve. If the real moral of "Snowboard Academy" is that drinking dulls the pain of an inescapable situation, I can't say I disagree with this movie. I couldn't have endured it sober.
1And here I oughta point out that it's just total coincidence that the first two of these movies feature the late Ernest P. Worrell in key roles, although it's a useful coincidence; if you're going to watch terrible movies in a serious way, you've gotta get really comfortable with Jim Varney onscreen.
2Named, for some needlessly confusing reason, "Sonjai," and played by a pretty terrible Chinese-Canadian character actor named Russell Yuen.
3(the more dastardly Nielsen later skips the Wile E. Coyoteisms entirely and attempts to detonate an IED during a giant slalom - this is that German/Russian/Danish/whatever ingenuity you keep hearing about, if you've ever taken a graduate-level business course)
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