No Good Very Bad Movies 13: The one that's NOT a Disney movie

 

Title: Frozen

What Year?: 2010

Classification: Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

I’m back with the first review of a new year, and I decided it was time for another installment of the Very Bad. It’s crossed my mind that, for anyone following this blog impartially, what’s here as opposed to my other features might seem just random. In making these calls, there’s three considerations that usually push a movie over the edge. One is certainly egregiously low quality, particularly in terms of production values. Another is notoriety, deserved or otherwise. The third and most intangible yet often decisive factor is pure strangeness (see Phenomena), especially on the level that makes a movie not just weird in itself but very difficult to classify. With this review, I have a movie that definitely falls within the latter two categories, a film that is either a modern cult classic or a critical bomb depending on your sources, and is even more problematic in terms of genre. Here is Frozen, a film that’s part thriller, part horror and part monster movie, and you better believe it came out before the Disney movie.

Our story begins with a guy, his girlfriend and his old buddy at an alleged New England ski resort, contemplating life and commitment. After a lot of griping about who is the third wheel, the trio cajole one of the staff into letting them on the ski lift as the staff are trying to shut down. Naturally, the lift is turned off for the full week, leaving the klutzes stranded high in the air with a snow storm incoming and a pack of wolves below. Our group must choose between biding their time or taking near-suicidal chances to escape, and it’s already clear this lot is bad at assessing risks and probability. Will any of them survive the night- and do we really want them to?

Frozen was a 2010 horror/ survival film written and directed by Adam Green. The plot of the film was highly similar to a 1969 short story “The Ski Lift” by one Diane Buttenshaw, published in the 10^th volume of the controversial Pan Book of Horror Stories series. The film starred Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers. While the script and dialogue portray a New England location, filming took place at Snowbasin in northern Utah, with many shots and scenes filmed with both the actors and crew on a ski lift. Scenes featuring wolves were filmed with trained animals, which one reviewer reportedly criticized as poor CGI. The film received many negative reviews and further criticism regarding the realism of its scenario, but has remained well-regarded among horror fans. Aspects of the movie were tested on Mythbusters, including a 2008 episode predating the film. The movie remains available on disc and streaming.

For my experiences, I have been collecting my thoughts ahead of the viewing or review, which included a quick reread of the short story, a savage little thing I remembered and eventually hunted down through its sole reprinting. With regard to the infamous coincidental title, the one thing that I found interesting is what might have been if the release dates and resulting situation had been reversed. (Oh, and by the way, I like Hans, while he's a real character!) What really caught my attention, long before I watched the movie, was the very striking similarities with the story, which can sufficiently described as marginally readable, then mainly for its compact prose and matter-of-fact brutality. I have been more suspicious about this than I normally would be, but what’s really of note is that the underlying idea clearly had an independent life that might long predate even the story. It’s worth further note that the story’s rationale is a real or imagined love triangle where the female party is absent except as a lure for the lunkheads.

Moving on to the movie itself, it is part of a trend I find particularly annoying: Rather than just making  bad decisions in an already difficult situation, like going into the cursed house on a stormy night or picking up a hitchhiker in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, the protagonists willfully go into obvious and avoidable danger in cold blood. In my judgment, this only ever really worked when played as very dark comedy (about the spirit of the story) or an archetypal Greek tragedy. In those terms, this movie is a case of too much and not enough; the characters are too likable to laugh at their fate, but not dignified enough to evoke true hubris. What keeps it more effective than it has a right to be is a scenario that covers most of the objections. For my nitpicking, my only real objection is that this would have worked much better set in the 1970s or earlier, when the legal as well as technological landscape was different enough that incidents like what we see might well have happened. (Amusingly, in the story, the protagonists are ingenuitive enough to climb onto the ski lift entirely unassisted.) I have also been tempted to “head cannon” the setting as where this was actually shot, which is in my back yard comparatively speaking t and still way out there even by our standards.

With all that out of the way, the film’s obvious strengths lie in its utterly grueling scenario and execution, which I find almost pointless to try to convey. The easy complaint is that would have been better as a short or an episode of an old-school anthology show, and further comparison with the short story definitely bears out the point. Given the risk taken, however, there’s no arguing with the result. There’s a lot of dead-air dialogue, amusingly arguing over many of the same Macgyver solutions brought up by reviewers, but there’s also poignance, vulnerability and growing despair. It’s all framed in the contrast between the intimate framing of the chair and frequent shots of the vast, bleak landscape. In the midst of the crushing indifference of nature, even the wolves are a brief, somewhat offkey intrusion, acting more like the clean-up crew than actively malevolent villains. The real problem is that the final act goes a long way to second-guess its premise and atmosphere, all hinging on a series of developments improbable enough that one could easily second-guess again and take it as a dying hallucination. Still, it works on its own terms, still stopping well short of a clear-cut happy ending.

Now, I originally made another skip to the “one scene”. In the final act, the girl manages to survive a fall from the ski lift, and manages to make her way along, alternately walking, crawling or just sliding along. One of the guys is unaccounted for, and we know the token carnivores are still around. This is another point of nitpicking, where my charitable reading is that they could be either actual wolves, coyotes, or some hybridized, feralized canid mix, of which the latter are more unpredictable and often flatly more aggressive. With this allowance, their behavior up to this point has been quite believable, especially if the lodge tourists and staff have treated them with the carelessness and insensitivity already in evidence. As she makes her way along, she sees blood in the snow, and we see gruesome proof of the fate of another character. Then her eye meet that of a single canine. It doesn’t attack, or even bare its teeth, but only gives a low growl and stares. I have said occasionally (see my Green Slime review from way back) that the most unnerving thing a “monster” can do is ignore potential prey, and this is my definitive case and point. It all passes in a moment, yet it’s as terrifying as anything we have seen in a harrowing film.

In closing, I still feel like I need to explain why I am covering this movie here. As already outlined, my deciding factor was jus how unusual and unclassifiable it really is; by comparison, I definitely decided against including it in Featured Creature or my other “genre” features. At the same time, it is definitely an example of an already problematic film that faired badly with the “mainstream”, on the whole probably an indication simply of the extent to which the filmmakers and distributors overestimated its potential. Fortunately, in the kind of circles where it was ever going to have a chance, it succeeded and still endures as a low-key, offbeat gem, and I for one quite freely concede that this is the reputation it always deserved. And with that, I’m done for another day.