Frozen (2010) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Thriller

It remains perhaps the most intense and terrifying film of the year: As Sunday evening falls, three snowboarding friends decide to take one last run down the slope. Halfway up the mountain, their chair lift stops, the lights go out and the resort closes for the week. They are stranded, but the worst is still to come. A storm is approaching. Frostbite is setting in. And on the ground below them, a pack of hungry wolves has gathered to wait. Kevin Zegers (Dawn Of The Dead, Wrong Turn), Shawn Ashmore (X-Men, The Ruins) and Emma Bell star in the relentlessly chilling thriller from writer/director Adam Green (Hatchet) that Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News hails as "a vicious, scary and horrifying experience...Frozen is a howling good time!"

User Comment: jonmon from United States, 11 February 2010 • The magic of Frozen is that there's no badguy. It's just humans against nature. I was worried at first that the film would be slow paced. I mean, how many things can happen within such a small space?

It turns out: plenty. Although time passes during the movie, the film does not give in to drawn out melodramatic sequences. They fight against nature, but the film is structured to attack them from all sides at once, but also in a way that's not transparently unrealistic. (Although personally I feel that nobody would have survived the cold and dehydration of the first night.)

We even learn a little about the characters, in a way that's more convincing than most disaster films, I am thinking for example of The Poseidon Adventure. There are no stereotypes here.

And they make mistakes. This isn't like Die Hard where the protagonist cleverly thinks of everything. Everything about the film, including their being trapped up so high, falls together like a series of coincidences, and that makes it even more horrific, because you start to believe that it might actually happen. There's even a little comedy to offset the horror, towards the beginning.

There is some gore in the film, but hugely less than I was led to believe. This is no Quentin Tarantino film and no slasher film either.

So having said what it's not, what is it? It's a thrilling look at how, even though we humans have extended ourselves into nature with technology, how reliant we are on that technology. It's an intellectual thriller rather than a supernatural or a serial killer freakshow thriller. It's normal people without heroic powers stuck in a situation that is near to real, the "Lost in Translation" of horror films.

I though it was fantastic. I'll give Frozen a 9 out of 10.

Summary: Fascinating.. a very hard trick to pull off with no human adversary!

[CSW] -2- They made too many mistakes for any thinking person starting with their con. I would have classified this as a classic Greek tragedy but I didn't feel that the main characters were basically good so the flaws leading to their downfall seemed almost inevitable. No point in keeping this (previously owned) as I won't ever want to watch it again.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

--- JOYA ---

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