October 14th, 2008 - Posted by: Powder Monkey
Get in the Mood for Winter with Apocalypse Snow: The Extreme Winter Sports Movie
Since last week’s impromptu snowfall, I have been getting quite excited about the onset of winter. It’s kind of premature to get the skis out so at the weekend I had to content myself with a game of family ski on the wii wearing my newly purchased bobble hat and goggles. But it transpired that I suck at virtual skiing so I’m getting my snow fix by watching skiing related clips on You Tube instead. While browsing I came across a trailer for Apocalypse Snow Le Retour and had to share it. It’s genius. Spiderman 3: The Dark Side meets James Bond: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
The action packed movie, which was filmed in Les Arcs and my adopted home town of Chamonix, features some of the biggest names in mountain and aerial extreme sports and some willing locals as extras: when the film crew rolled into Cham there was no shortage of volunteers to appear in the mass chase scene filmed at Grands Montets.
For the benefit of non French speakers the plot goes something like this. A ski suit engineered to transform the wearer into the supreme master of all snow sports (if only such a thing existed) is stolen and so ensues a thrilling 26 minute chase to retrieve it by whatever means. As well as some awesome skiing and boarding sequences the movie also showcases the latest in extreme winter sports including speedriding and wingsuiting.
In the original, which was filmed in Les Arcs, the hero out-rides a pack of monoskiing baddies on a prototype snowboard. Although snowboarding had been dreamt up in the US two decades earlier, the sport had yet to capture the imagination of European winter sports enthusiasts and it was the widespread showing of Apocalypse Snow that prompted a snow sports revolution across the continent. It’s a wonder that zorbing, the practise of rolling down the mountain in a giant beach ball, never took off in quite the same way!
The original is available on something called VHS from Amazon and Le Retour is due to be in the shops before Christmas on DVD. What great gift ideas.
Tags: Chamonix, Les Arcs, Monoskiing, Speedriding, Wingsuiting
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