DVD Artwork
I will have to admit that my first thoughts upon reading about Frozen weren’t exactly filling me with excitement. I mean, how engrossing could a movie be about three friends stuck on a chair lift at a ski resort? Well, quite often the most simple ideas prove to be the best and that is most certainly the case with this fine movie.
Parker, Joe and Dan, aside from having horror related names, are three friends who take a trip to a local ski resort in the hopes of getting a few runs in on the cheap. Not wanting to pay full price they sweet talk the attendant into letting them ride for less than the asking price. All goes well with this ploy until they try to squeeze one last run in before the slopes close for the week. Before you know it the chair lift stops, the lights go out and they are left high, dry and very, very cold. So begins an ordeal of survival against nature and the elements.
What director Adam Green has brought to the screen here is miles away from his Hatchet movies. There are no boogeymen here and no lighthearted tomfoolery, this is stone cold horror quite literally. Apart from some joking between the characters early on in the movie this is a deadly serious exercise in nail-biting terror. It’s not often a horror movie comes along where you really don’t know what is going to happen come the closing credits, and as such Frozen kept me gripped throughout. The tension is quite unbelievable in places.
There is the odd gruesome moment here, although the most effective moment was when the action happens off screen and the camera lingers on the characters faces. It was a quite grueling scene that worked wonderfully.
What also helps lift Frozen is the terrific haunting score, which coupled with the beautiful cinematography, adds to the incredible sense of isolation of the events unfolding on screen. This and the good performances from the three leads all add up to a thoroughly entertaining dose of slow-burning horror. You also get a familiar face pop up in a cameo role which was fun as it added to the story rather than detracted from it.
For me personally Frozen ranks up there as one of the best horror movies of the year, from what I have seen anyway. It also goes to show that Green is not a one trick pony and is definitely proving to be a versatile director when it comes to horror. It’ll be interesting to see what project he decides to tackle now that Hatchet 2 has been released.
Horror doesn’t have to have masked killers, zombies or ghosts and the like, it can in fact be very real and very effective. Frozen got a very limited theatrical release early in 2010 so I am sure it didn’t get the audience it deserved, so now that it has finally come to DVD I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out. It will certainly make you think twice before taking the last chair lift when you go skiing!
A great movie! A simple premise executed perfectly.
