What a great concept for a movie. We’ll take three obnoxious bozos, stick them on a ski lift and then have them get stuck on there with no one to help. We’ll even have a storm...and maybe some wolves. Yeah, that’ll be great!

It’s part of my peculiar nature to find a premise like this intriguing. How the hell do you generate drama with three people stuck on a ski lift? I have no idea, but if it involves pain, degradation and broken limbs, I’m up for it.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to sympathize with the grabass-tic amphibian shit on display here, but I despised them from the get-go. We have an airhead girl, her annoying, sleazebag boyfriend and their equally sleazy friend. They’re the kind of over-privileged, cheap-ass people that won’t pay full price for a ski ticket but at the same time are so out of touch with reality that they think that minimum wage is called minimal wage. These dickheads have led lives that are far too comfortable.

You know that these people have never done a real day’s work in their lives or ever struggled for anything. How do I know this? Because one of the guys, Dan, spends all of his time wearing a ridiculous white woolly hat. He even wears it indoors when he’s eating. Yeah, anyone who brazenly wears a tea cosy on their head all day long, a tea cosy that makes their head look four times the size it really is, has never experienced any true pain. The only conflict they experience is deciding what porno video they should masturbate to or what shitty-ass band they should cram into their fucking iphone 4 (hmm, Drowning Pool or Rev Theory?). These people need a harsh dose of reality.

Reality rears its ugly head when they decide to do some night skiing. It’s pitch black but they somehow manage to talk their way onto the ski lift. No one else is being taken to the top but this doesn’t dissuade them. They continue to talk inane, asinine bullshit. Little do they know, though, that down below there are staffing issues. The lift operator is called away to talk to his boss and his replacement doesn’t realize that there are three people heading for the top. So the lift’s turned off.

The three hateful turds are stuck on the lift for no longer than, ooh, ten seconds before they start discussing the worst way to die. Tea cosy twat-face Dan thinks that it would be especially bad to be eaten by a shark. His idiotic friend, meanwhile, thinks that the girl on the Jaws poster is hot. ‘Naked chicks are hot.’ Why didn’t they just have a scene where the tosser pulled his shrivelled little member out and talked with it? ‘Naked chicks are hot. Blah, blah, blah! Tits, tits, tits! I never get any. I’m so sad! What did I do to deserve being stuck with this douchebag for eternity?’

But although the film references Jaws, it more closely resembles Open Water. However, Open Water was a pretty decent film. This, though, is atrocious. Sure there’s joy to be found in it. Mainly the joy of watching smug twenty-somethings getting eaten by wolves. But it’s a pretty feeble piece of writing and filmmaking.

To illustrate the level of writing on display here, there’s a scene where the girl starts telling everyone how much she needs to pee. Okay, this is a real concern if you’re trapped somewhere for a length of time. But the girl sounds so pathetic - so babyish and whinny. Plus she also actually says the following line: ‘I need to pee...wicked bad.’ That line probably got the biggest laugh out of me in the entire film. More even than the bit where tea cosy guy gets eaten by wolves.

Yeah, you heard me right, tea cosy guy gets eaten. He decides to be a hero and jumps off the ski lift. Only problem is that he’s a long way from the ground and breaks both of his legs. We see the bone sticking through his twisted limbs and he screams his head off. But the fucking tea cosy on his head remains stubbornly in place.

The effects for this horrible injury are pretty terrible. There’s a bit where he’s lying there in the snow and it looks like his head is poking through a trapdoor and that the body and legs are cheap prosthetics. The crunching of broken bones and squelching noises are also incredibly phony. Plus this injury does a very strange thing and actually makes Dan sound retarded. I know that pain can do lots of things to people, but there’s a moment where it actually sounds like his brain has been stabbed. ‘Mmmsdfsdf sdffsdfs legggssss huuurrrrtttt!’

The reward of all this is getting to watch Dan get eaten. Eventually he attracts the attention of a pack of wolves. At first the wolves are easily scared away but after a while they’re not so easily deterred. And there’s a brilliant moment, right before he gets devoured, where Dan draws his tea cosy over his face. Yeah, cover your bulbous bonce with that fucking thing. Make sure that the wolves don’t have to look at your annoying face when they’re tearing into your flesh. Although, having said this, I do wish that one of the wolves would have removed the hat with its paw and slapped him in the face with it...

Of course, Dan’s girlfriend and their toolish friend Lynch get to hear Dan’s screams. And Dan even manages to order his girlfriend not to look at the wolves when they’re having their elevenses. ‘Don’t let her look!’ he screams to Lynch. Oh, what a great guy! What a hero!

The range of emotions that follow this are both cringe-worthy and hilarious. Lynch and the girlfriend argue at first and then they console each other with hugs. Aww, bless. But Lynch is such a sleazebag that I was half-expecting him to ask her for a hand-job or something. ‘Go on, just a little one.’ Thankfully, this doesn’t happen, but then in an arse-puckering attempt to generate sympathy or emotion, the girl says how she has a puppy at home. But if she’s not home to take care of the puppy, the puppy is going to starve to death. But worse than this, the puppy is going to think it was abandoned. Really, you go to a ski slope to spend all day snowboarding and you don’t tell a neighbour or a friend to look after your dog for the day? It’s not a fucking cat - isn’t it going to just piss and shit everywhere and eat your sofa? Maybe if you told someone where you were going, you wouldn’t have to worry about your puppy eating its paws while crying its eyes out and whimpering, ‘I thought she loved me.’

Other humiliations follow. The girl falls asleep and gets her hand stuck to the ski lift rail and then later she pisses herself. This latter moment is especially mirthful because the flow of urine is immediately followed by a swelling orchestra. Is this meant to be a grand, emotional moment? Is this her nadir? This is worse than her boyfriend getting eaten by wolves?

More poorly conceived character development takes place and Lynch tells the girl how he once thought he’d met ‘the one’. Like him, she was also into Aerosmith! Please, wolves eat this bastard!

Thankfully, the wolves comply. You see, Lynch manages to pull some James Bond shit and climbs the ski lift wire hand over hand until he gets to a support pole - a pole that has a ladder on it. But no sooner has Lynch reached terra firma than some wolves have jumped on him and are having another snack.

This leaves just the girl. By some quirk of fate, the ski lift come crashing to the ground and she makes a bid for freedom. However, before she reaches the bottom of the slope, she stumbles upon the wolves feasting on Lynch. She backs away and eventually manages to reach the road. Brilliant! Her puppy now is not going to eat its own head! And everyone lives happily ever after...

...Except the girl then hears the voice of her boyfriend echo in her head. ‘You’re going to be okay, baby.’ And then hilariously, even though it appeared at the beginning of the film, the title ‘Frozen’ snaps onto the screen in huge letters. It’s meant to be a final punch in the face. ‘Take that - take my heavy-hitting film and try and digest it and then shit yourself because it was so traumatizing.’ But Frozen isn’t traumatizing. It’s a walk in the park.

The opening to Cliffhanger is meant to be a harrowing experience. We're meant to feel enormous sorrow and pity as an innocent woman plunges to her horrible death. But how can we experience any kind of horror when Frank, a helicopter pilot played by Ralph Waite out of The Waltons, is in the background cackling with laughter? Just watch him. His eyes sparkle when Stallone tells the distressed woman that she's not doing to die. And he collapses in near hysterics when she falls but a few seconds later, obviously finding some kind of sick humour at the thought of the girl being smashed to pieces on the rocks, thousands of feet below. Contrast this with Michael Rooker's overacting – he almost faints as if he’s in a Jane Austen novel when he sees the girl plummet – and you have a scene that is tailor-made for chortles rather than gasps.

But to be fair to Stallone and the girl, they carry themselves pretty well in the scene. The girl pleads and pleads, and Stallone gamely hangs on. And the situation itself is excellent – huge drop, cracked harness, burly, lazy-mouthed actor trying to hang on to a hysterical woman who won’t shut the fuck up. But whenever I watch it, I can only see Frank's huge grin, his glowing eyes and him hooting in the background as Michael Rooker’s world falls apart. What exactly does Frank find so funny? Is he an evil old buzzard or has senility stalked its way into his spongy old brain? In his advanced years, does he think that the woman will be caught by kittens and rocketed to Valhalla in a chariot driven by mohawked-squirrels wearing diamond-encrusted strap-ons that spurt single-malt whisky? Or does he just not give a shit? Who the fuck knows...

However, as inappropriate as it is, Frank’s laughter isn’t entirely out of place. Nope, laughter is a common reaction when watching Cliffhanger. This isn’t to say that I dislike the film. It's a very enjoyable B-grade action movie. But it can't transcend the clichés of the genre.

One of the clichés the film adheres to is that the villain must be English. Well, at least I think he is. John Lithgow plays the main baddie and puts on an accent of some sort. But it's an amusing performance. His best bit has to be when he gets Stallone to climb up a rockface to get his money. "You, stay,” he says to the dribbling Rooker. And then to Stallone: “You, fetch." The joy is in his exaggerated enunciation. ‘Fetch’ somehow seems to have acquired an additional five syllables. Another funny bit is when Stallone throws Lithgow's money into the helicopter's rotors. "Damn you, Walker!" he screams like he's split a fingernail.

But there are other English villains. The first is Caroline Goodall who comes across as a low-rent Emma Thompson. But much more amusing is Craig Fairbrass (Dan out of EastEnders). His performance is atrocious. All he does is shout and swear. And he does it in a thick Cockney accent. “Fack this! Fack that!”

Fairbrass is immortalised in the scene where the drooling Michael Rooker goads him into beating him up. The Cockney is about as bright as a puddle of oil and forgoes a quick kill in favour of a prolonged pummeling. It turns out that Fairbrass' character is an ex-footballer. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising when his dialogue consists of lines like: "Yeah? And you're a loudmouth punk slag who's about to die." The only people I know who talk like that are West Ham fans.

But Fairbrass proceeds to give Rooker a surreal football-themed kicking, complete with running commentary – he even runs up to take a penalty. Is this how Hollywood sees the English? We're either effete brigands or beer-swilling hooligans. Actually, thinking about it, it's quite an accurate observation. Well done Renny Harlin. In your world of back-swimming sharks and flying Indy cars, you managed to find a single truth.

However, my favourite villain of all is played by Leon (he's so cool he doesn't even have a surname). He’s a tough Lennox Lewis-looking-like-motherfucker who eschews Fairbrass' shouty brand of villainy and instead tries to be quietly intimidating. This would be great but his line delivery is atrocious. He has no timing and seems incapable of emphasizing the right words. Where Lithgow can stretch and bend and slather layers of wonderful ham on his dialogue, Leon can only make his words sound like leaden mouth farts.

But to give the guy his dues, it is noticeable that, unlike Fairbrass, he does excel once he gives in to his urge to shout. He has a great scene in a cave where he actually seems like a genuine threat - he stalks Stallone and his girl with menace, taunting impotent old whitey with his ultimate fear; his girl having a black dick thrust upon her (and her liking it!). But before Stallone’s girlfriend Jessie has to suffer this outrage, Stallone grabs Leon by the balls and gorilla presses him through a spike. It's a WWE sort of death…which unsurprisingly I dig a great deal. (Although the filmmakers did miss a trick by not having Stallone yell, ‘You get the point!’ before shish-kebabing the scary black man.)

Speaking of Stallone, how does he fair in this film? Well, I've never really had much of a problem with Sly as an actor. Yeah, technically he’s not too great and yes he sounds like a man who was born with his brain upside down, but he is capable of a good performance here and there - just watch Copland or Rocky Balboa. Sadly, Cliffhanger is not one of those films. He’s okay at the beginning, showing humour and charm, but after the accident it all goes downhill. His idea of being haunted is to mope about like a thirteen-year-old that's been told to stop using his father's credit card to download porn. It's so amateurish.

Thank Christ then for Stallone’s bulging biceps! It’s these puppies that are given the opportunity to shine. I mean, just take the scene where the villains order Stallone to climb the mountain to retrieve their money. They make him remove his jacket. I can't help but feel that this wasn't done to prove how evil the villains are, but to allow Sly to climb while flaunting his thick, muscular arms. We don't want those babies covered up, no sirree!

However, Stallone and his biceps look like Marlon Brando compared to the "Whoa, dude!" extreme sports enthusiasts that pop up. They're sort of like Bill and Ted but without the charm. In fact, I wasn't distraught that one of them died; I was distraught that one survived. But at least the death of the Kurt Cobain lookalike gives us a hilarious silent "No!" moment from the gurning Michael Rooker, who once again amazes me with his sincere cheese. But then later on we get to relive the hilarity, because Frank's death elicits another rib-tickling "No!" moment.

Hey, what can I say, the old buzzard had it coming. You ain't laughing now, are you?