Movies
Sundance ’10 REVIEW: ‘Frozen’ Unbearably Suspenseful
To go along with my raving review, beyond the break you’ll find Ryan Daley’s thoughts on Adam Green’s Frozen, his thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend. Dalye’s thoughts? He says Green “ sustains a level of suspense that is almost unbearable at times.” Read on for his review and go see if the film is playing at a theater near you when Anchor Bay releases it in theaters this weekend!
During a time when every good movie of the 20th century is being crammed through the Hollywood remake machine, Adam Green’s Frozen centers around a cinematic premise so basic and brilliant, it’s amazing that nobody has ever thought of it before. Three friends get stranded on a ski lift after the resort closes one snowy Sunday night…and the resort doesn’t open again until Friday. Green approaches the nightmarish scenario with an eye on agonizing detail, putting his three central characters through all manner of winter hell with an almost gleeful relish.
When longtime buddies Dan and Joe head up to the New England mountains for a day of skiing, Dan insists on bringing his girlfriend Parker. It’s a move that irritates Joe, who wasn’t planning on spending the day on the bunny hill, but the issue is put on hold after Parker manages to seduce some discount ski passes from a husky lift operator. As in Adam Green’s previous film, Hatchet, much of the first 30 minutes is invested in character banter, and it bears mentioning that not all of it is witty. But even if the early dialogue isn’t quite as funny as it wants to be, it sets an essential stage for the harrowing events to follow.
As the day draws to a close, Joe starts bitching about how much Parker has ruined their day of awesome man skiing, so the boys decide to head up the mountain for one more last run before the resort closes. To Joe’s chagrin, Parker tags along. The husky lift operator is about to shut down for the night, but the trio convinces him to let them board the lift one last time. Needing to talk to the boss about his schedule, the lift operator passes responsibility off to another employee, telling him, “there are three more coming down”. When three guys on snowboards reach the bottom of the mountain a few seconds later, the chair lift is shut down for the rest of the week, leaving Dan, Joe, and Parker stranded halfway up the ski run.
Over the next hour, Green sustains a level of suspense that is almost unbearable at times. From frostbite, to sub-freezing urination, to hungry wolves, if there is an aspect of extreme weather chair lift survival that is frightening or gruesome, you can bet your ass that Adam Green explores it in Frozen. Speaking of the wolves, it’s worth mentioning that Green’s decision to go with actual trained wolves, as opposed to the “we-still-can’t-get- it-right” CG wolves of most recent big-budget flicks, is a decision that truly jacks up the tension.
It’s during the final hour, when the characters’ nerves are stretched tight as lift cables, that the verbal sparring of the first 30 minutes really begins to pay off. As mentioned earlier, Green seems to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in putting his Frozen characters through the physical and emotional ringer. But his enthusiasm for the power of story is palpable, and the result is an independent nail-biter that makes Paranormal Activity look like a drama club skit.
Rating 4 out of 5 Skulls
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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