Tropical Snow

Tropical Snow was described by Bill Kelley of the Sun Sentinel as "that bleakest of low-budget entities – an exploitation B-movie with a social conscience".^[4] Kelley criticized the direction and acting, stating both were done with the "sort of solemn incompetence that only the truly untalented can achieve", noting that even the explicit love scenes had a "sad, desperate quality". While praising Carradine's performance, he described the remaining cast as "unconvincing" and concluded by calling the film "boring".^[4]

In rating the film one star out of five, Michael Mills of the Palm Beach Post stated that "despite its poetic title, Tropical Snow is glum and prosaic".^[5] The same review did praise the film's cinematography, observing it "gives everything, even the hillside shanty towns, a tarnished glow".^[5] The movie was noted as "timely" given the attempts by Colombia to pursue drug lords at the time the film was made.^[6]

Juan Coto of the Miami Herald gave the film two and a half stars out of five, praising the "strong" performances by Garcia and Stowe. The performance of Carradine was also praised, with Coto opining it was "surprisingly genteel" and "perhaps the kindest drug dealer ever put on screen".^[2] He finalized the review as "topical" but "sometimes as simplistic as the metaphor in [the] title".^[2] Critic Steven Puchalski also sees Tropical Snow as a "gritty potboiler": "Maintaining a serious tone throughout, [Durán] captures the poverty and despair of his [Colombian] home turf, while demonstrating how prostitution, crime and drugs could seem like the only way to succeed". The film still made concession to commercialism, as with "scattered moments of overheated drama and lots of gratuitous nudity from both Stowe and Corri".^[1]

• Tropical Snow at IMDb
• Tropical Snow at Rotten Tomatoes
• Tropical Snow at the TCM Movie Database (archived version)