The darkness is shattered by a glare of white light as the tape begins to play, static again? No, this time it’s actual snow, a blizzard, it swirls about the screen, the camera is fixed on something blue- grey, is that? The picture spins, a dizzying whirl, the sound of howling wind and…other howling.
The spinning abruptly stops and the camera focuses on a snow boot, the top of the foot, we’re looking down, did somebody drop the camera? The picture slides slowly to the right, blurry dark shapes move about against the fuzzy grey-white snow below, out of focus.
The camera jerks into motion again, the ground rushes up to the meet it, with a loud screech the picture turns black again but the howling continues, the wind and the…other. You’ve had enough, you reach to eject the tape but the tape is already out.
The howling…continues…
Phew, no anthologies this time, in fact this is a fairly short one, but a bit of a different genre to we’ve had before. That’s right it’s Disney’s…OK obligatory joke out of the way, the actual film I’m reviewing came first, it’s Adam Green’s 2010 film Frozen.
I say it’s a different genre, I mean it’s the ‘People trapped in/on X’ genre, which we kind of had with Devil, but this is real life stuff, no supernatural stuff here, and that, is what makes these kind of films special. This is something that could feasibly happen to you, and that, for me, is scary.
So what’s the premise, and is this actually a horror film?
The film follows 3 friends, Dan, Parker and Joe as they spend the day on the slopes, skiing and snowboarding. Dan and Parker are a couple, with Joe being Dan’s best friend. Everything’s going well till the three of them become stranded on the chairlift, the operator having shut it down thinking everyone was off. The place is shutting down for a few days so no help is coming any time soon. So that’s our set up and it takes it’s time getting there, but honestly, we’re going to be spending a large portion of this film in one place, so it’s nice to have the long build up.
So is it horror? Well I think so, it’s a horrific situation to be in and more importantly it feels like one. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to cut to potential rescuers, it’s not some epic disaster movie. It’s 3 people in terrifying situation trying to survive. We also concentrate on the darker side of things such as injury detail.
Now I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before. I am generally fine with gore, I can watch it no problem…mostly, it all depends on how real it is, the more realistic it becomes the harder it is to watch. Like I’m fine with something like Braindead where there’s ridiculous gore all over the place, but something like Hostel is hard to watch. Now I’m not saying this is a Hostel, but it has realistic injury so consider that a warning if you struggle with that.
OK, let’s talk about how I felt watching this film. You would think it would be boring, and yes, a lot of the time it is, but the rest of the time the way I felt was on edge, I found myself thinking stuff like “Oh no, that’s a bad idea” or just generally stressing out, which is exactly what a film like this should be doing to you. The problem is, these moments are interspersed with dull, boring dialogue where we ultimately find ourselves waiting for the next thing to happen rather than engaging with the characters.
Characters is a strong word. I get that this isn’t some slasher film where we get the archetypal characters, these are supposed to be regular people. The problem is, they’re too regular and the parts where we’re not watching them actually doing stuff really drag. They’re not terrible and I think a lot of the criticism the film got for poor acting is a bit overblown, ultimately it’s an interesting idea that ended up fairly middle of the road.
That brings us to the score. Reflecting the middle of the road status I’m giving Frozen 3 frostbitten fingers out of 5. I did enjoy watching the film, but it’s not hugely memorable, in fact when I came to do the review I’d already watched it not too long before, maybe a year or so but I quickly found myself trying to remember what happened in between those parts that had stuck with me. If you’re a fan of this genre of horror, then chances are you’ve already seen this anyway, but if not then it’s very competent if ultimately a little dull.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
So in regards to injury detail we have a couple of main examples. The more gory and objectively grosser one would be when we see Joe’s gutted body after the wolves have partially eaten him. Yes, it’s fairly graphic but to me it’s happened in the past by the time we see it so I didn’t find it hard to watch. It’s actually much worse earlier in the film when we hear Dan being attacked, killed and eaten by those same wolves, and that’s just audio, but it’s happening there and then.
The other example and the one I actually flinched away from was when Dan decides he’s going to try and jump down to the slope bellow. This is where the aforementioned “Oh no, that’s a bad idea” popped into my head. We can tell from the camera angles that this is too high to be jumping down onto compacted snow. It doesn’t go well. I just watched it again to refresh my memory and I had to look sideways at the screen. So he lands, straight legged and breaks both of his legs, the bones sticking through the skin, and THAT is the kind of thing that scares me, I can imagine it, and it reminds me of how ultimately fragile my body is.
You know, I thought I might have more to say in this section but really there’s so few specifically interesting things that happen. It kind of highlights what I said earlier that much of the film is fairly dull, interspersed with exciting moments, though having said that, other than the jumping down and maybe Joe and Parker’s individual more successful attempts to get down, there’s really not a lot I’m excited to talk about.
OK, I’m going to attempt to get off this review, wish me luck…
Summerisle 