Wild Bill's Run (2012) User Reviews

Found Footage Documentary Offers Intrigue

[zblinks · 8/10 · 21 January 2013]

I saw the feature doc at the South Dakota Film Festival. The audience and I truly enjoyed the film. A few hundred viewers were laughing and had plenty of follow up questions during the Q&A.

Wild Bill's Run tells a true tail of Bill Cooper leading a rag tag bunch of adventurists on an attempt to cross the arctic ice cap on snowmobiles, from Minnesota to Moscow in the 1970's.

Director Mike Scholtz got a gift set in his lap when he found reels upon reels of documentary footage from the original cross arctic trip. Combining the priceless original footage along with personal interviews with a number of the members of the expedition, Scholtz crafts a well paced film with plenty of humor and even a few twists.

The film has been circumnavigating the festival world and will likely find a home on a television channel.

If you see it at a festival near you it is worth pulling on your snowmobile suit and taking in this arctic adventure.

A charismatic guy leads an ill-prepared snowmobile expedition through the frozen north

[insightman · 5/10 · 28 December 2012]

This documentary consists of some silent film footage and photographs from 1972 and recent interviews with some of the people involved in this strange undertaking.

"Wild Bill" is a smooth-talking adventurer who convinces a bunch of men to join him on a snowmobile trek from Minnesota through Canada (where they have to forfeit their handguns) all the way to Greenland (where they forgot to bring their passports), with the grand idea they're going to somehow make it all the way to Moscow (where they plan to bypass the hostile government, meet up with real people, and defuse the Cold War).

Of course, when "smooth talking" is part of a description, you can expect that the big plans of the person doing the smooth talking don't proceed as originally described. Still, thanks to their survival skills and some good luck, these people returned and are now telling the story of this improbable expedition.

The film leaves us with unanswered questions, but I found the story of people following someone almost blindly into the dangerous arctic regions and surviving was entertaining. This might be a good film to watch on a hot summer day--the descriptions of the cold weather near the North Pole in this film will cool you down right away.