Skip to main content

"Frozen" could have been a killer chiller

Wednesday, January 27, 2010
PARK CITY: "Frozen" delivers enough thrills and gory chills to satisfy the horror film crowd, but is not made well enough to be a first-rate thriller.

A great premise in which three friends are stranded on a chairlift in the dead of winter is squandered to satisfy the expectations of the genre. The Anchor Bay Films release should scare up reasonable returns in theaters and after-markets from the usual suspects, but not beyond that.

The main thing a writer and director needs to do in this kind of horror show is create a self-enclosed world that allows the audience to suspend disbelief and experience the full shock of the situation without asking "why didn't he?" and "how come?" questions. Hitchcock, of course, was a master of this. In this case, unfortunately, writer/director Adam Green is not.

After Joe (Shawn Ashmore), Dan (Kevin Zegers) and his girlfriend Parker (Emma Bell) scam their way onto the slopes, it's all downhill from there. Due to some confusion at closing time, the three friends get stranded 50 feet up in mid-air, in mid-winter as night approaches. Like Kubler-Ross' stages of dying, they go through a number of reactions, the first being denial: someone will come along in no time.

When that doesn't happen, anger and recrimination surface as the reality of their situation sinks in. If that wasn't enough, a storm blows in with hail and swirling snow. Dan is the first to go. He decides he can survive the jump and go get help. Wrong. He lands with a thud (kudos to sound mixer Douglas J. Cameron for this and other weather-related effects) and smashes his legs, the bone protruding grotesquely through the skin. This is the first of several moments when even the hardiest filmgoers may turn their head away from the screen.

When a pack of wolves (convincingly shot by Will Barratt and crisply edited by Ed Marx) get a whiff, that's the end of him. Now the despair sets in, along with severe frostbite. Joe is next to go. He fairs a little better initially and works his way across the cable to a ladder. The wolves reappear and chase him down the hill. When he doesn't return with help, that leaves poor, frozen Parker on her own. A few agonizing moments later, she's on the ground to meet her fate.

One of the big problems here that prevents the audience from getting swept away, rather than just oohing and ahhing at the horrific happenings, is that you don't give a damn about these people. Green is not specific enough in the writing to make them seem like real characters with their own history, and when he does try it's awkward and heavy-handed. And for their part, the actors are too stiff to sell it.

Green misses other opportunities. Fear of height would have been a good quality to exploit, and although there is some impressive crane work around the chair, he doesn't do enough with the altitude. Their deterioration is based more on Robin Michelle Patrick's makeup work.

And why don't any of them have a cell phone on them, even if it won't work on the mountain. And the reason given for why no one will come and look for them is not convincing. This is not to say that "Frozen" won't make your palms sweat, it just could have been so much better.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

India's swine flu death rate is increasing

Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...

Suicide bombings kill 18 in Iraq

Thursday, August 13, 2009 MOSUL: At least 18 people, most of them members of the ancient Yazidi religious sect, were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up on Thursday in a packed cafe in northern Iraq, a local government official said.At least 31 people were also wounded after the bombers detonated suicide belts packed with explosives in the cafe in Kalaa town, in the district of Sanjar, local district chief Dakheel Qassem Hasoon, told a foreign news agency."Two suicide bombers entered the Cafe Barbaroz at 4:30 pm (1330 GMT) and blew themselves up, killing 18 civilians and wounding 31. Most of the victims were Yazidis," Hasoon said.Kalaa, northwest of the insurgent stronghold of Mosul in northern Nineveh province is predominantly populated by the minority Yazidi religious sect, as well as Arabs and Kurds.The attack is the deadliest since Monday, when 51 people were killed across Iraq, including 28 members of the tiny Shabak sect cut down when two truck bombs det...

US drones to target Taliban in Afghan war

Friday, July 31, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US military plans to use more drone aircraft to target Taliban militants in Afghanistan while focusing less on hunting down Al-Qaeda figures, report said on Thursday.Although defeating the Al-Qaeda terror network remains an overriding goal for Washington, officials now believe the best way to pursue that objective is to ensure stability in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan instead of Al-Qaeda manhunts, the paper said, citing US government and Defense Department officials.It was more important to prevent a slide towards violence and anarchy that could be exploited by Al-Qaeda, which used Afghanistan to stage its attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the officials said."We might still be too focused on Bin Laden," an official said. "We should probably reassess our priorities."The shift in priorities for the drone fleet comes despite President Barack Obama's declaration that defeating and dismantling Al-Qaeda ...