Director: Radu Gabrea
Cast: Sally Kellerman, Michael Moriarty, David Mendenhall

When my thoughts in my idle time do not dwell on the fascinating topic of unknown movies, they will occasionally drift into my thoughts of experiences that I have had in the past, whether it was recently or a number of years further. Inevitably, I start to think ofway (but not too "way"!) back when I was a child, and the various experiences that I had. Sometimes I start to think about experiences I had attending school, though I must confess that I don't dwell on these thoughts too much because of a number of uncomfortable experiences there that I would rather not mention or discuss to anyone. There's one particular kind of childhood experience that gives me warm thoughts when I start my recollections, and that was when I was at day camp. See, during the summer in my childhood years, my parents obviously didn't want me hanging around the house all day, so they arranged it so that I would be Shanghaied to day camp five days a week. I hated just about every aspect of day camp. Although I was a child when I was at day camp, the activities there that the counsellors would try to make us participate in were too childish for my tastes. There were a lot of simple art and crafts projects that you'd associate with kindergarten-aged children, made worse by the fact that the day camp apparently didn't have enough of a budget to provide enough art supplies to the kids. Also, there were periods when the counsellors would read stories to the children, an activity I had outgrown years earlier, and made worse that the stories being read were baby stories for the very young. But I did get one amusing experience with the storytelling, and that was when one counsellor read us a Disney story of Pinocchio, and try as she could, she could not properly pronounce the name "Geppetto". Now, I don't have Italian ancestry, but even as a toddler, I could pronouce that name.

Being utterly bored and repulsed by the activities counsellors at the day camp, I realized that I would have to find some activities on my own to give me my daily requirement of entertainment. Once I quietly crept away from the day camp and make a long foot trek to a video arcade. Though I got away with it, I realized shortly afterwards that maybe doing it again would be pushing things too much, and I might be caught and get into trouble. So I had to stick to the general area of the day camp. Fortunately, the day camp was located way out in the countryside, in a public park that had a large forested portion. It was big enough that it would take some time walking from one end to another to properly map it all out in your head. I happily spent hours in that forested area, making my way through the winding trails while the sound of the gently running nearby creek rang in my ears. Looking back at this particular experience, I realize now what I realized then - kids love to explore. Just think back on not your personal experiences when you were a child, how much you liked to encounter a new area and explore it extensively. But also remember the juvenile literature you read at your local library. You will no doubt recall dozens of stories involving the Hardy Boys and other young literary protagonists finding themselves in a new environment and checking it out. I have no doubt that when you were reading those stories, you imagined yourself with those youthful protagonists and sharing the same thrills that they inevitably experienced. When I look back on it all, I realize that after so many adult experiences, I much less often come across something that is so new and different that it bubbles my adventurous spirit as it did when I was a child. No doubt you would agree with me on that to some extent, my faithful and seasoned readers.

I feel that I should add that while I was exploring those woods as a child, I was hoping to have an additional experience like many of those youthful protagonists I read about as a child. That being that somehow in those woods I would stumble across treasure. Maybe I'd come across gold or jewelry. Maybe I would stumble across a briefcase full of money accidentally left behind in a botched drug deal, though in that case I now see that taking possession of that particular treasure might lead to problems. So I think you can see why the writers of juvenile fiction concerning exploration would usually throw in some treasure. It promised readers that hard work in exploration would be rewarded greatly. The whole exploration/treasure angle has also happened in movies plenty of times as well, so coming across the family movie The Secret Of The Ice Cave did not surprise me. The youthful protagonist in this telling is a Los Angeles teenager named Alex (David Mendenhall, Over The Top). His parents divorced a while back, so he is living with his stepfather while his mother Valerie (Sally Kellerman, All's Fair) is in Chile looking for an endangered species of spider. Wanting to see his mother, Alex decides to defy his stepfather's orders and travel by himself to Chile. In the meantime, Valerie's scientist partner Victor (Norbert Weisser, Schindler's List) is expecting to soon be delivered by shady characters a treasure map that supposedly leads to ... well... treaure. Through various circumstances, Alex gets his hands on the map, and decides to make the trek to find the treasure. During his journey, he is accompanied by a girl named Ona (Marcia Christie, The Sure Thing) that he first bumped into earlier. When Valerie and Ona's father Manny (Michael Moriarty, The Stuff) find out their children are gone, they frantically start to search for them. However, at the same time the children are being pursued by Victor and his henchman, and they will stop at nothing to get the treasure all for themselves.

The aforementioned plot of The Secret Of The Ice Cave probably to you doesn't sound at first glance that much removed (if any removing at all) from the various tales of youthful treasure hunting you experienced as a youth. But if you were to watch this particular tale, you'd probably see that never before have you seen such a treasure hunt depicted so badly. It's so badly done that even the cast can't generate anything resembling interest in their surroundings. Although the production managed to round up two fairly well-known adult actors (Kellerman and Moriarty) to headline the movie, both actors clearly show their discomfort throughout. Kellerman looks and acts extremely tired, even though the movie a few times makes her character disappear from the movie for extended periods of time. Moriarty isn't as lucky as Kellerman despite disappearing for a long time during the movie's extended climax. He seems to be in pain when his character reveals something about his hippie past, such as a bizarre rant about his experience at Woodstock. Apart from Moriarty's character's hippie past, we really learn nothing about him or Kellerman's character except they come across as self centered and just think of their own interests. For that matter, we don't really learn about Victor as well, the remaining adult character with major bearing on most of the plot. Perhaps pandering to the (very few) kids that would ultimately watch this movie, actor Weisser seems forced to depict the character of Victor as simultaneously ruthless and goofy. As you've probably guessed, it doesn't come across as believable in the context of this particular treasure story, despite the story having both serious and comic relief moments throughout. For an audience to get a solid hold of a villain, the villain should try to stick to one extreme or another. If he keeps changing his tone, it comes across as if the character is instantly changing for the filmmakers' convenience.

As for the youthful protagonists, played by Mendenhall and Christie, they also change extremes throughout, though in their cases they seem to be alternating between the feelings they are acting against their will and disinterest. My guess is that they were pretty unhappy with how the screenplay by Mike Werb (Face/Off) depicts their characters and budding relationship. There's no real moment when the two characters really talk. Yes, they exchange a lot of words, but none of those words gets them to open up about themselves or explain how they feel. It's then a real surprise when they start to have romantic feelings towards each other, especially since when their parents catch up to them (which is never seen - the movie abruptly cuts to them together some time after the fact), they complain about finding the two youths kissing, which we also never got to see. That's not the only plot puzzlement to be found in the movie - we earlier saw the youthful protagonists not hearing a plane land a few seconds walk from their position, the protagonists later don't do logical things like grab the bad guys' guns or inflict any kind of incapacitation when getting the upper hand against their foes, and the eventual revelation of the treasure simply doesn't make sense after everything we saw before. What's worse about the script is how utterly dull it is. Despite the fact that footage seems to be missing here or there that would have made the story have more sense, the movie still runs for a whopping 106 minutes. The story is way too padded, one example being that the quest for the treasure by the youths doesn't really start until more than a third of the movie has run by.

There have been successful movies about treasure hunting that have run longer than The Secret Of The Ice Cave (such as Raiders Of The Lost Ark), but they were careful to throw in high quality action on a regular basis to keep the audience interested. However, this is far from a George Lucas / Steven Spielberg production; the movie was made by Cannon during their severe financial problems right after Menahem Golan left the company. So not only do we not get high quality action, we don't get much action, period. What little action there is incredibly badly handled by director Radu Gabrea. You would think that being on a plane in mid-flight where the pilot has died would be suspenseful, for example, but this scene and every other moment where the audience should be grabbing their seats is sluggish, shows no danger for the characters, and comes across as a matter of fact. Actually, I feel a little bad criticizing Gabrea for his direction because he was obviously not given much of a budget or resources to work with. (This may also explain the aforementioned plot holes.) There's one scene where the two youths are climbing a mountain, and offscreen we hear the antagonists' car shriek to a halt (on a dirt road?) and hear them get out of their car, and suddenly the antagonists run into the camera frame. That's right, the production couldn't even afford to show us all of that simple event! There are other extreme cost-cutting measures, such as when guns are fired, the production couldn't even afford blanks, instead dubbing "bang" noises over guns that produce no smoke when fired. Under these dire circumstances, even the best director might have been challenged by this project; all Gabrea was apparently able to do successfully was to shoot on some visually impressive Chilean deserts and mountains. And in a cave as well, though be warned - there is no ice in the cave, despite what the title promises. As for the "secret" of the title, it's the fact that Cannon (understandably) barely pushed this movie out to the public, making it almost unheard of today even by fans of the studio.

(Posted October 5, 2025)