OUT COLD []
“No brains, no headache.” Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG-13 (topless women, much sexual suggestiveness). At the Empire, the Sutton, Loews 34th St., others.
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‘OUT Cold” is a cheerfully dopey snobs vs. slobs teen comedy that does for snowboarding what 1984’s “Hot Dog: The Movie” did for skiing – turn the sport into a scenic backdrop for hormonal guys and scantily clad babes.
Seventies TV icon Lee Majors – hilariously identified in the press notes as “an actor of international importance,” though he hasn’t made so much as a cameo in a major-studio feature in 13 years – stars as mogul John Majors, who buys a bohemian Alaska ski resort called Bull Mountain with the intention of catering to the latte-loving Aspen crowd.
That won’t be easy, considering his rowdy local staff is more interested in chasing women and partying at the local bar, which Majors – ne Mankiewicz (in the movie)- rechristens the Power Room.
This raffish bunch wants to carry on in the iconoclastic traditional of Bull Mountain’s eccentric founder, Ted Muntz (the final performance of the late Lewis Arquette, whose character dies before the opening credits are over – but is represented throughout by a statue of him dropping trou).
Rick (Jason London), a townie hired as the resort’s new manager, learns Majors’ French daughter, Anna (Caroline Dhavernas, who drops the accent after her first scene), is the woman he had a fling with at a Mexican resort.
“Of all the bars in all the resorts in Alaska, she had to walk into mine,” he complains. Plus, she’s got a fiancé in a wheelchair and a Swedish stepsister (Victoria Silvstedt) who likes to take her clothes off.
Just how much sexual suggestiveness is the MPAA ratings board allowing into PG-13 movies these days? A bearded swain (Zach Galifianakis) gets pleasured by both a polar bear and the water jets of a particularly aggressive hot tub.
A fantasy sequence of topless models in a ski gondola is another selling point.
“Out Cold,” directed by brothers Brendan and Emmett Malloy from a script credited to Jon Zack, also boasts nice British Columbian scenery, OK performances – and the funniest (as well as most representative) line I’ve heard in a movie so far this year.
“We have a saying around here,” one character says. “No brains, no headache.”
