Whether she’s skeet-shooting, serving time, pledging her allegiance to Satan, getting swarmed by bees or shacking up with a teenage student, Kate Jackson always looks effortlessly cool. And as an Iditarod hopeful in The Cold Heart of a Killer (1996), she’s practically frozen. While her Charlie’s Angels costars sang Christmas carols and helped save Santa and his elves from certain death, as we’ve explored in recent weeks, Jackson never made a holiday telefilm. But her springtime race across the snowy, windswept Alaskan wild will make you shiver, and it’s not just the subzero temperatures that are deadly—there’s also a killer on the loose.
Jessie Arnold (Jackson, also executive producing) is a former sled-dog musher whose competitive career ended five years earlier, when she narrowly escaped death in a savage storm. Since then she’s become one of the state’s premier dog breeders, developing a new breed of Huskies for racing purposes. Her pack is poised to make its Iditarod debut with her newly sober brother, Robbie Pierce (Philip Granger). When he’s lured to his death by a shadowy figure, Jessie has no choice but to enter the race, competing not only as a tribute to Robbie but because she’ll lose both her kennel operation and custody of son Matthew (Kevin Zegers) if she doesn’t bring home the $50,000 grand prize.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.