Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

MartinHafer In the 1960s, some idiots bought this Finnish-Soviet production and brought it to the screen. The problem is that the plot involving a Finnish folk tale was confusing to Western audiences, so the film was chopped to pieces--and almost 30% of the original film was thrown on the cutting room floor. As a result, it's very dull and confusing--and not worth your time. There is LOTS of narration to fill in the gaps but the film never is interesting or coherent. HOWEVER, I am not maligning the original film--just this terrible dubbed mess seen in the States.While bastardizing a movie like this seems odd today, American-International did this a lot--buying up Russian and Japanese films and creatively editing them into American films. Sometimes they inserted down-on-their-luck actors into the films (such as Basil Rathbone) and I sure would rather see the original movie--which MIGHT actually be pretty good. But, in the 60s, they rarely trusted foreign subtitled films--and sloppily dubbed them. Sad...and stupid.

lemon_magic Like most people, I only saw "Sampo"/"The Day The Earth Froze" as an episode on MST3K. Hopefully, though, that doesn't mean I am not qualified to comment on it, since I can distinguish the actual movie from the 'Bots good natured riffing on the subject. There are movies that MST3K covered because they were terrible, and there were movies that they covered because they were...odd and silly, at least to our sensibilities. "Sampo/TDTEF" falls into the latter school. My feeling is, that you have to make allowances for something like this. It's based on a fairy tale, for one thing, and not one by any Western story teller I knew, but some obscure Finnish guy. (Well, that at least guarantees that the story will be relatively fresh, as opposed to using the Grimms or Hans Christian Anderson.) It's obviously aimed at a juvenile audience, and the story is from the 'magical logic' school of plotting, where stuff happens just because it made some sort of deranged sense in the mind of a tot. You know, witch kidnaps the hero's love interest so she can get a "Sampo", but the hero steals the Sampo back, so the witch steals the SUN (she already has the North Wind in a baggie in her cave, so I guess this is on the same scale). So the village starts to freeze, and the villagers attack the witch by playing autoharps "en masse" and the music causes her to turn to stone and...you can't help but fell that this Finnish story teller had hit the schnapps and Aquavit vodka pretty hard before he sat down with pen and paper. And the dubbing is terrible; the heroes all talk in wooden monotones and the witch sounds like she suffers from throat nodule and hemorrhoids, and everything (including the music) is muffled and muddy. Some of this may have been due to a bad print. I am pretty sure that some whatever nice poetic conceits and allusions the screenwriters attempted were lost in the translation, because the dialog and speeches are mannered and clunky and dead in the water. The lines just lay there. This isn't helped by the fact that whoever these filmmakers were, they weren't very concerned about their story being accessible to non-Russo/Finnish audiences. On top of that, the "Earth" version seems to missing some footage cut from it - that makes the plot look even more disjointed than it is in the original. But still...there is some charm and quality here that speaks to the viewer's sympathy and attention if you can get past all the problems mentioned above. Someone took a lot of care and thought with the costumes, makeup and sets, and there are really nice shots and camera angles that please the eye in almost every scene. The 'special effects' are pretty laughable to our sensibilities, but they actually work in the context of the art direction. There's even a particularly memorable head shot of the "Immortal Blacksmith", glaring into the camera, framed from behind by a raging fire, which wouldn't be out of place in a much glossier, more expensive movie.I can't rate this particular cinematic experience above a "four", because the dubbing made my ears bleed. But I am sure that the original version was probably a great treat for its intended audience many years ago and a continent away.

Raymond Tucker Directed by Russian fantasy film maker Alexander Ptushko, so you can count on striking visuals and lots of in-camera effects (lots of dissolves, split screens etc.) Despite cheesy dubbing this film still holds much of its fantastical charm. It has a look similar to German expressionist works like Fritz Lang's 'Siegfried' or Murnau's 'Faust'. It also strikes me as possibly inspirational to Guy Madden's films such as 'Tales of the Gimli Hospital' or 'Careful'. (Its antiquated appearance is only enhanced by the poor faded color present in the prints I've seen. Definitely worthy of a Ruscico DVD restoration/release) After watching my non MST3K'O'd copy, I just can't get that crazy harp theme from the film's climax out of my head. One of the most persistent tunes since "In Heaven" from Eraserhead. "SAMPO...SAMPO...SAMPO!"

Pete-156 I can only remember seeing this movie once, back in my schooldays in the early 70's. The tile being "The Day the Earth Froze". What most comes to mind was the fantastic atmosphere it had, very dark, gloomy almost surreal. It was about a Sampo (as far as I could make out or remember, it was a machine for making either money or gold). Everyone in the movie seemed old, dirty and poor. I think it was their quest to find the sampo or retrieve it or something like that. I would love to know if the movie ever made it to video.