5 Nail-Biting Mountain Climbing Thrillers

In the vein of Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger, this 2000 action-adventure film directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) casts Chris O'Donnell as a climber haunted by the past who must strap on his ice spikes to rescue his sister (Robin Tunney) near the top of K2. Bill Paxton and Scott Glenn also star. While the dialogue and drama is hokey at times, with some over-the-top stunts and implausible scenarios, Vertical Limit still manages to entertain and put you right in the middle of the action.

This 1991 movie based on the stage play inspired by a true story finds Terminator star Michael Biehn and Matt Craven (A Few Good Men) as weekend warrior mountain climbers who scale the second-highest mountain on Earth. There, they face the wrath of avalanches, extreme weather conditions, devastating falls, severe hypothermia and altitude sickness.

This intense 2008 German film follows the true story of a famous competitive attempt in 1936 to climb the north face of Eiger in Switzerland. A German team vs. an Austrian team attempt to tackle the mountain's near-vertical 5,900-foot north wall, also known as the Murder Wall, only to encounter the forces of nature. Can they survive?

One of the most amazing true stories ever recorded is painstakingly chronicled in this heart-pounding documentary. A pair of climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, tackle the Siula Grande in the Andes, but on the way down Simpson falls and suffers a major broken leg. Tied together by a rope and blinded by a storm, Yates must cut the tether to save his own life, dropping Simpson into a crevice. But Simpson manages to not only survive, but make the excruciatingly painful journey back to base camp, crawling one foot at a time. Watch this, and you'll never complain about that blister on your toe again.

Jon Krakauer's (Into the Wild) intensely gripping read about the 1996 Everest disaster -- in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a sudden, blinding storm -- was turned into a so-so 1997 TV movie that failed to capture just how incredible the events were that transpired. Pick up the book for one of the most memorable true stories ever written, and watch the movie if you can't wait.

It's Into Thin Air all over again... One of the deadliest days in Mount Everest's history occurred over the weekend, and in the wake of today's tragic news that four climbers died near the "death zone" summit of the world's highest peak, we've rounded up five nail-biting mountain-climbing thrillers – three true, one inspired by a true story, and one purely fictional.