My only exposure to Sampo (aka The Day the Earth Froze) comes by way of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I have an extensive collection of MST3K movies (almost 200) and of those the Russo-Finnish movies (Sampo, The Sword and Dragon, Jack Frost, et al) are among my favorites. They lend themselves to Mystification but are entertaining and, (dare I say it?) absorbing in and of themselves. They contain a quaint charm and stark moral values and despite their quirkiness, are entertaining. In a day and age in which we find serial killer 'good guys' and ambiguous moral lessons the old Russo-Finnish fairy tales are the preferred entertainment for this century's jaded child. This review is not about The Day the Earth Froze SPECIFICALLY but is merely a comment on the simple moral tales of the good-old-days. R.I.P.

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.

This is a ok yarn of a Finland fairytale what else to say