What Lies Above (2004) User Reviews

Disappointing all around

[jamjohnx3 · 3/10 · 21 July 2007]

So I caught this one afternoon as "What Lies Above" and actually watched it because the beginning was somewhat promising. The heroine, Diana Pennington, is a mountain climbing expert...but that doesn't help her when her fiancé Brian gets hurt on a climb. When she goes off to get help and returns, he disappears from the mountain, never to be seen again.

Two years later, Diana is still a climber...but she won't go near Snowman's Pass. That is, until Curt Seaver appears and tells her that he can find the body of her lost fiancé with a new satellite program. She agrees and they take off up the mountain with Curt's two assistants: His "bodyguard" Hugo and the computer whiz Tyler. From the start, you know that there's some ulterior motive going on, but unfortunately the twists aren't good and lead to a laughably bad chase sequence that makes up the last 20 or 30 minutes of the movie.

The major disappointments are the red herrings, most of which have supernatural undertones that never come to fruition. The object from the sky that fell into the mountains (which turns out to be not so supernatural), the story of how Snowman's Pass came to be, and the most memorable one of them all: Diana's dream sequence halfway through the movie. But what disappointed me most is where they dropped the ball. The majority of the movie revolves around the search for Brian, that's why I can't for the life of me begin to understand why the mystery of what exactly happened to him and where he was is never solved through the course of the movie. This was the major plot. This was how the movie STARTED! How do you NOT wrap that up?

I wouldn't tell too many people to bother with this one...

Mountain climbing babe outwits half-wits

[rstricklin · 4/10 · 23 August 2005]

I caught this film -- under the title of "What Lies Above" -- on Lifetime movie network last night, and just had to comment on it. Designed as a resourceful-woman-in-peril, action adventure yarn, it is so unintentionally funny (thanks in large part to Marc Singer's scenery-chewing hammy performance)that I thought I was watching a cross between "Cliffhanger" and "Home Alone 5." Heroine Nicole Eggert makes her devious but dumb as dirt male pursuers look like the Three Stooges succumbing to her ridiculous makeshift booby traps (somehow she manages to devise a swinging battering ram with rope and a log in a matter of minutes, which temporarily takes out one of the knuckleheads who want to kill her). Worth watching for a hearty laugh.

Why was this movie made?

[nabor7 · 4/10 · 9 November 2004]

The limited scenery views were the only saving grace to an otherwise uneventful and boring movie. The acting was borderline absurd which I blame on the script and screenplay. Nicole Eggert didn't look the part, didn't act the part, and was totally unconvincing as a mountain guide. After watching this I was left with the feeling that some friends had some free time and decided to make a movie. It must have been produced on a budget of pocket change. The plot was thin at best and with the low caliber of acting at times it begged the question to be asked, "Why are we doing this?". I managed to sit through the entire movie but also asked myself, "Why?".

Very Disappointed in this TV FILM!

[whpratt1 · 1/10 · 18 November 2004]

Somehow, I really thought that I was going to enjoy this film because I love pictures with mountain climbing and a great mystery in the plot. I must say that the photography was fantastic and there was some scary scenes that captured my attention. I thought that Nicole Eggert,(Diana Pennington),"Thank You, Good Night",'01 played a very convincing role as a young girl who had a tragic loss in her life and meets up with some characters who want her to guide them up the mountain. Marc Singer, "Angel Blade",'02, played a very unconvincing weird guy and over acted in many scenes with a bad temper that looked comical. This film was a big disappointed and not worth watching, unless there is nothing on the TV to ENJOY!!

Could not believe it could be this bad

[Night-6 · 30 January 2005]

I love suspense movies. I love Marc Singer. When he plays a villain, he is truly frightening....but the acting here was just so over the top, it makes one wonder, who was directing this movie and who did he know to get the job?. Now, if just one of the actors' performances was bad one could look to blame the actor....perhaps. However,in this case EVERYONES performances were so over the top that they were comical at best and an insult to the audience. It seemed as if not one of these actors had ever acted in front of a camera before. Yet, I have seen many of the actors from this production, in other movies and they were very good if not down right great. I can only put the blame for this "Made for TV movie" on inadequate directing and poor writing. We can not always blame the actors when the movie misses...and this movie misses by miles. I was incredibly disappointed.

Mountain Madness

[sol-kay · 5/10 · 3 December 2006]

(Some Spoilers) Outrageous outdoor thriller that reaches such heights of both altitude and insanity that one of the main stars in the movie Marc Singer as the twinkle brained electronic nut-case Curt Seaver seems to have completely lost his composer. Seaver cracks up in a number of scenes and coming across far more crazier then he really had to be for the role he was playing.

This whole mess starts when the two star crossed lovers Diana & Brian, Nicole Eggent & Garvin Cross, take a trip up on Snowman's Pass to see the wonderful and forbidding sights of nature there. Brian all of a sudden falls on his knees and pulls out a wedding band proposing his love and affection for his one an only love a startled and very agreeable, to his wanting her hand in marriage, Diana. With all that out of the way the two lovebirds decide to fly, or climb, up the side of a cliff where Brian loses both his grip and balance and despite Diana holding on to him fall and ends up badly injured.

Running to the nearby weather station to get help on the phone when Diana finally gets back to where Brian was he's gone never to be seen or heard from or about again until two years later. It's then when this creepy looking character named Curt Seaver pops up in the local grocery store. Finding Diana, who's there shopping, he tells Diana that he needs her, who's also a top mountain climber guide and has expert knowledge of the Snowman's Pass area, help to help him find her Brian. Diana's friend and grocery man Ed, Bruce Dawson, is so mad that he's almost about to whack this weirdo right between the eyes for bringing up this very unpleasant and sad subject. Diana curious at what Seavers has in mind and later seeing him at the coffee shop where he told her he's be if she wants to talk to him. Seaver comes up with this strange story that can only come from the mind of a kook like himself about using this computerized satellite searching gizmo that he came up with called "Searchlamp".

To make a long story short it turns out that Seaver together with his two flunkies bodyguard Hugo and mountain climber and computer hacker Tyler, Mike Dopud & George Stults, are not at all interested in finding Brian, dead or alive, but this satellite that fell to earth and crashed in and around Snowman's Pass. The satellite has in it information that can change the course of human history. That information will be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars from the most powerful nations on earth to pay anyone, like Seaver & Co., who'd be willing to sell it to them.

***SPOILERS*** We never really get to see or find out what exactly this extremely important information that's worth enough money to pay off the US National Debt, the whole caboodle not just the annual interest payments, is. We also never get to find Brian's body which must have been both dragged away and eaten by a grizzly bear or mountain lion. But we do get to watch or suffer through Seaver & Hugo make jackass' of themselves trying to get Diana who after getting wise to them lifted the vital and earth-shaking satellite information from Seaver's lab-top computer, on a CD disk. Diana then threatened to put in on the world net where it would become worthless with the whole world knowing about it.

Tyler turned out to be the good guy of the trio in that he was forced to go along with them in order to keep from being whacked. Tyler had himself messed around with Seaver and Hugo's computer lab-top almost letting the cat, the secret and vital information, out of the bag or computer. For that he was put on their sh*t-list which was a long fall off a short cliff unless he went along with them. With Diana getting away and only Tyler, being an experienced mountain climber, able to catch her he was made to climb up a cliff and keep her from getting away and releasing the valuable satellite Information. Still he screwed up, on purpose, letting Diana escape where he was dropped off the mountain side only to survive but unlike Brian he stayed where he laid until both Diana & the grocery man Ed came to fetch him, broken bones and all, at the end of the movie.

Ridiculous and laughable final that's so unintentionally funny that in some ways saves the movie from being a total disaster. With Seaver letting it all out, in more ways then one, as he together with his fellow lunatic Hugo huff and puff trying to bring the weather station, where Diana is hiding from them, down only to get juiced by a live wire. At one point in the movie Seaver trying to break into the barricaded weather station had his ruby red, probably a result from the thin air up on Snowman's Pass, nose protrude through a crack in the door. I was hoping that Diana would slam the door on it but unfortunately to those of us watching the movie she didn't.

this TV-move is bad..

[aperture66-patryk · 2/10 · 15 October 2005]

I saw this on a boring Sunday morning just this morning. Well I was drawn to the fact that it's an outdoor movie.. I was hoping to find some nice sceneries but it the views where just limited.. They just go back and forth in the same spot all over again.. I hate it when they're using this so called hi-tech stuffs like the this Motorola blue-tooth headset they're using to eliminate the use of a walkie talkie it was just so funny.. they look like amateurs. And they where like advertising those badly designed alien-ware Laptops that could link up to a satellite to find people.. I couldn't say more about this TV-movie.. The ending was bad that it looks like they cut it short eliminating the use of rescue helicopters and etc.. */**********

Oh, please ...

[Rob_P · 1/10 · 22 March 2010]

SPOILER ALERT.

This movie will spoil your afternoon or "wee small hours of the morning" viewing slot.

I like Marc Singer. He has portrayed good characters in the roles I have seen. Until this movie.

What starts as a promising movie soon disappears up itself with the disastrous cgi'd background and the extreme close up on the person about to die...

Then it gets worse.

A lot worse.

To describe it as hammy acting would insult pigs. This movie goes to the bottom of the ham barrel and scrapes the acting off there.

Apart from Marc Singer's overcooked hamming it up, Mike Dopud stomps and plods around the scenery looking as if he is afraid he might fall on the rocks and his wide-eyed 'manic' bad guy just makes him look like a moron. He isn't menacing at all.

George Stults looks like a deer caught in the headlights. He claims to have been threatened by the other two but his character would have been threatened by a cashier offering him "paper or plastic".

This is really a vehicle for Nicole Eggert as an independent woman getting her life back despite attracting the wrong sort of man... She was unremarkable.

This is not a remake but this is remarkably similar to "Cliffhanger" - seasoned guide, loses someone in a fall, conscience pricked to help out someone else, a missing treasure worth oodles of money and a gang of n'er-do-wells who exploit the guide. Except Cliffhanger was a great vehicle for Stallone and Lithgow. I must admit, Lithgow stole the show.

Even the unintentional comedy was poor. There were times when I wasn't sure if they were using a rubber-faced model as a stand-in for Singer as he tried in vain to storm the weather station (no pun intended). Pressing his face to the door post and his clumsy manner in general did nothing to help his character.

Avoid.

No, seriously, avoid it. Save 96 minutes of your life and do something else more constructive like watching paint dry or grass grow. Or just close your eyes and examine the backs of your eyelids for 90 minutes...

Totally devoid

[caa821 · 3/10 · 18 June 2008]

Gotta add a comment to this one!!!

First, ironically, one needs to add the "spolier alert" to conform to IMDb's parameters, but there is absolutely nothing here to be "spoiled."

There are six characters: the good-looking gal whose the A-list mountain guide in the area of the "climb," and apparently among all guides (including Mt. Everest Sherpas) on the planet; her lost love, who disappeared from the titled pass two years prior, whom the party is purportedly seeking, but never find; her store-owner friend, also a guide, who may be better than a Sherpa but no match for her; the weird lead actor who engages her services, and says they'll find her long-missing love in the bargain; his one associate, a computer hacker with purportedly limitless expertise, of a level sufficient that Gates might seek advice from him; and his other colleague, a bodyguard who apparently has an IQ not even near three digits.

There are, of course, nefarious goings-on, and the secret quest of the lead actor is to gain recovery of a satellite which has fallen in the "Pass," and has world-altering and unique data to bring them untold riches. Exactly what is never revealed.

Overacting abounds, the script looks like something which might get a C- in a freshman writing class (but an F if submitted at a higher level), and the thespians gnaw every piece of scenery like a horde of beavers.

The most interesting aspects of this movie for me was juxtaposing portions with three other flicks or roles I've seen.

First, the mysterious, undisclosed secret data makes one recall "The Spanish Prisoner," an A-list/Mamet film, surrounding a valuable corporate "process," never specifically clarified, but better for it. Definitely not so here.

Second, the lead biscuit proved perhaps even more resourceful then "Rambo" in dealing quickly when menaced later in the presentation.

Third, I remember a Steven Seagal flick (don't recall the title) where he was semi-conscious and abed for about 1/3 of the time, and fully-comatose for another 1/3. Although I've not sought viewing a lot of his work, I've seen enough to have noted that while comatose, he provided the best work he ever has, and most in-line with his laconic persona. In this opus, while awake, the young hacker may have been the most engaging personality on-screen, but while indisposed and incapacitated during the latter portion, and unable to emote, he provided the best acting during this seemingly unending two hours.

Take the thin, silly basis for a plot here. Imagine it being compressed into, say, a lbit on SNL, with Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Martin Short in the four roles. They could get record laughs with few changes to the dialog here.

The most interesting aspect in the last analysis is contemplating what information could have been in the spy satellite to be worth "even billions" to any of many nations, and yet rendered worthless (according to the guru hacker) if simply placed upon the internet, with no apparent consequences thereafter? Even a turkey like this one should have at least a small trace of logic somewhere. This one is totally devoid.

On DVD, it's actually quite presentable, despite all its faults

[JohnHowardReid · 7/10 · 23 August 2009]

Judging by the slew of bad reviews, the 2004 made-for-TV movie, "What Lies Above" (aka "Snowman's Pass") is a load of rubbish. I'm sure it was just that – on TV where tension was dissipated by incessant rounds of atmosphere-destroying commercials. On DVD, however, "Snowman's Pass" comes across despite all its faults (shaky acting, a holey plot, obvious penny-pinching), as fairly suspenseful entertainment. Indeed it actually delivers a few really exciting, edge-of-the-seat moments. Marc Singer's acting was certainly over-the-top, but nonetheless enjoyably grotesque. The other leads (particularly Nicole Eggert, George Stults) were okay. Admittedly the three minor players (the soon-to-be-departed boyfriend, the dull storekeeper, the inattentive weather station jerk) were less than impressive, but none of them were on-screen long enough to do too much damage.

Insult to intelligence

[bluebellthecow · 1/10 · 21 November 2012]

Its amazing, to me anyway, how many people have reviewed this film and written more sense than the film itself. A basic Cliffhanger story, whose initial plot is never resolved, where's Brian's body? Lots of plot holes, poor script, lousy acting, bad SFX etc. To be honest how do you get funding for a film like this? It doesn't even spark my curiosity into funding as that would admit there was a glimmer of hope for this film! In all don't bother, watch sesame street instead! At least its educational and you might learn the alphabet or how to count to 10! And although I have just written another review or condemning remark I would submit to others not to watch it and have it instead deleted off of IMDb!

Marc Singer is a beastmaster!

[frontporchblues · 10/10 · 4 June 2006]

This was some of the best acting known to man. It puts the Godfather and Jaws the Revenge to shame! I'm surprised that the body bag was not nominated for an academy award!. I'm only surprised that Marc Singer did not have his talking hawk and loin cloth on. Or.., was it his talking loin cloth? Not sure all I know is that if they were not walking single file on the movie set it would have meant sure death for all. I found it amusing that when the boyfriend fell off the cliff, he up and walked away. Additionally, I like the fact the firestation or whatever it was had a bunch of computer equiptment and they leave the door open and nothing is stolen. What planet was this movie made on.

Title difference

[kg042291 · 1/10 · 8 July 2022]

The title I was looking up was Snowman's Pass thinking it was a Bigfoot movie, which I love. Then see the title What Lies Above. Really not what I was thinking.

odd , very odd

[veronicammartin · 12 December 2011]

I watched this afternoon film on the first afternoon of my Christmas holidays .Otherwise I think would have given it a miss but just wanted to chill and unwind.

The basic storyline is that of a young newly engaged woman , engaged a matter of minutes on top of a minute when her fiancé is killed . Move on two years and she is again on the mountain leading some odd guys on a rather ridiculous quest .

The acting was rather over the top especially the lead man , who has a weird expression akin to Christopher Lloyd in back to the future. The end was really cheesy and naff and I could never quite work out what happened to the disappeared body .

Hammy and Techno Fail

[thebushwacker · 5/10 · 3 October 2021]

"What Lies Above" 2004. It goes by different titles .. Original Title: Snowman's Pass 2004; Now Title: What Lies Above 2004; and YouTube Title: Death Pass 2004 // Marc Singer has a great personna, but he is hammy. If you thought he was hammy in the Beast Master TV Series, 2001-02 ... you will be shocked to find out he is even more hammy in this. The story is pretty cookie cutter, and they try to get all into techy stuff, but between the writers and the director, no one knows the difference between a floppy disk and a monkey wrench. // The Bushwacker 10/3/2021.

Snowmans Pass is a classic!

[scoobdoobydoo · 10/10 · 1 November 2005]

Unfortunately, classic unintentional humour. You have to see this movie, I've seen it about 5 or 6 times now and cant wait until Marc Singer begins to lose the plot about half way in. This guy overacts but it is so funny. His dialogue and gestures are classic. The amount of times he tries to get the heroine to "talk about it" and/or "make a deal" is hilariously too many.

Using a basic laptop and pretending it has some amazing search program on it, the Three Stooges hire some blonde from Baywatch to help them track down her dead boyfriends body. But there real evil plan is to find some satellite that fell out of the sky. Curt (Marc Singer) is the boss who simply orders his cronies Hugo and Tyler about but with little success. Tyler rebels (!) and ends up getting thrown off a cliff in a hilarious stand off scene but it turns out the cliff was only about a few feet deep. Tyler then spends the rest of the film unconscious, which is no bad thing. Curt (the ultimate mastermind) then orders Hugo( Stephane Henchoz) around looking for the Baywatch girl but he falls for some insane tricks. It then turns into a scoobydoo cartoon type film with the Baywatch Blonde constantly getting the better of Curt and Hugo. The final showdown with Curt is so fantastically overplayed, it made me laugh for ages and crave the next showing off this.

I advise all to check this out for a good laugh.