13 Days to Halloween (10) - Adam Green's Frozen

BLOT: (22 Oct 2010 - 01:19:05 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (10) - Adam Green's Frozen

Let me put to you a simple, maddening fact: horror remakes are utterly superfluous. We are talking about a genre carved with the stone of simple premises. An X comes to Y and terrorizes Z. Aliens crash land in a small New Mexico town and chase a group of school kids out camping? DONE.

See Frozen, Adam Green's movie about three twenty or so college students who decide to go back up in the ski lift one last time and, after a miscommunication about who is up the mountain, get caught six stories above the ground during a winter storm with hard, icy snow beneath them. It was Sunday night, it will be Friday morning before the resort re-opens. And they are just dumb enough to do most things wrong: aren't quite dressed warm enough, left their cellphone back in the lodge (which a lot of skiers do, apparently, to get away from it), kind of snuck off last minute so no one knows exactly where they are at. Et cetera.

The movie starts with a close focus on the three of them, and will spend most of its time on just the three of them. Or at least, you know, what's left of them. The horrors are mostly real world: frostbite, numbness, lack of food and water, and wolves. It is moody once it starts, and keenly desperate, and low-fi. You watch the scene as Emma Bell's Parker pulls her frozen hand away from the metal bar, and then silently stares at the ruined, broken flesh...and it works. She gives in and urinates on herself in one scene, and then breaks down and starts crying, and you undrstand. Life sucks for her. You get the emotion and you feel, well, cold. Very cold.

Putting aside the so-called natural dialogue that doesn't quite sit, and the not-quite realistic wolves—they are actual wolves, not CG, which is cool, but they are played off as ruthless rather than more animalistic—the biggest problem with watching this movie is going to be the "I could have don that better!" syndrome. If you watch it with more than one friend, it is guaranteed that someone is getting out a chalkboard and is going to map out the relative tensile strength of jacket-ropes and angular momentum used to soften impacts of falls. Try heading over to something like IMDB.com, you'll see what I mean (no links for Satan).

Here is my recommendation. Turn the lights off. Turn the thermostat down to about 65 degrees. Sit back, and watch it all in one go with no distractions. Stay in the mood for this one.