Stephen Cole
From Friday's Globe and Mail
Frozen
- Written and directed by Adam Green
- Starring Emma Bell, Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore and Kane Hodder
- Classification: 14A
Another date movie-horror flick designed to scare tentative couples into each other’s arms, Frozen is the grisly tale of three collegians stranded on a stalled ski chairlift. It’s Sunday night. Resort workers have all gone home and aren’t returning until Friday. Left behind are young couple, Dan and Parker, along with his best friend, Lynch – all of them dangling 60 feet up in wild air.
Plot complications: Pink ski-jacketed Parker has to go to the bathroom. And hungry wolves are circling below, howling for people popsicles.
Frozen would get props for a novel plot, except that its storyline appears to be ski-lifted from the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry is stuck on a chairlift with an Orthodox Jewish woman who is terrified of being seen with a man after sunset.
The kids in writer-director Adam Green’s (Hatchet) new chiller-thriller have more to worry about than breaking Jewish religious laws, to be sure. Pretty Parker’s face is sprouting hoarfrost. And Dan and Lynch go mad trying to outfox wolves. Still, the film is only occasionally scary fun. For most of its 90 or so minutes, Frozen is just that, stuck with nothing to do on a chairlift. There are some nasty moments, but not enough of the cattle-prod jolts horror fans prize.
Nor is Frozen the engaging talkathon it sets out to be. All three kids do a lot of yakking, but their meandering conversations never lead to any unexpected, hidden drama. And at no time are their lives made more interesting by their mountain misadventure.Filmmaker Green also spends way too much time setting up the premise, then playing puppets with his dangling characters. The film’s big bid-to-escape scene, when it finally comes, takes up too little time and doesn’t involve enough climactic hurdles.
The acting, by Emma Bell, along with Canadians Kevin Zegers (Transamerica) and Shawn Ashmore (X-Men), like Frozen itself, is merely all right. Then again, Parker, Dan, and Lynch really have little to do.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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