133. Peter Berg, Paul Gross & 'Aspen Extreme' (1993)

Full Cast And Crew

Summer's over and it's time to transition to winter and that means SKI FILMS.

Avoiding pap like "Ski School" and "Hot Dog: The Movie" we are instead taking up a listener suggestion to pod about 'Aspen Extreme'...a film I quote comedically (and to generally blank stares) all the time. Turns out this movie's actually really good and a cut way above the usual dumbass soft-core porn ski comedies all too frequently littered across our slopes in the 80's and 90's.

Aspen Extreme was written and directed by Patrick Hasburgh, who went on to create TV's 'Hardcastle & McCormick' and '21 Jump Street', and was originally conceived by Hasburgh as a darker and grittier look at ski-town life; the highs and especially the lows: the drugs, the empty pursuit of thrills at the expense of relationships, the death and injuries. But Hollywood Pictures insisted on cuts and on a marketing campaign geared around the phrase "Top Gun on the slopes" which bore little resemblance to the actually well-written character study/fish-out-of-water buddy dramedy he turned out.

Over time, 'Aspen Extreme' has settled into a comfortable middle-age. Screenings in Aspen now have the glow of fondly reminisced times past, and the cast seems to have all thrived in the decades since release.

So while I intended this episode to be tongue-firmly-in-cheek...I was actually surprised even as a fan of this movie to discover it's a totally competent, even moving film set in and around a ski resort, not just another ski comedy with lowbrow jokes and ethnic stereotypes ('Chinese Downhill'...I'm looking at you, 'Hot Dog')....