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Rated: 5.00/5 | Votes: 1 | Views: 186 |Submitted: 02/09/10

FROZEN Review
by Heather Wixson

Starring Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore, Kevin Zegers
Directed by Adam Green

In FROZEN, we meet three college students, Lynch (Ashmore), Dan (Zegers) and his girlfriend Parker (Bell) who decide to hit the slopes for a little fun in the snow.  The one catch is that none of them can afford the costly lift tickets so they bribe the lift operator to let them do the runs on the DL. 

Their plan works, but ends up with some deadly consequences. At the end of the evening, the trio ask to take one last run and due to a series of unfortunate human errors, they end up stranded on a chair 50 feet above the ground and no one at the slopes are any the wiser.  The place vacates during the week and no one is due back to work at the lodge for at least five days.

What started off as a fun trip to the slopes ends up in an exercise in terror, and it's up to Lynch, Parker, and Dan to find a way to make it off the chair and get themselves to safety.

Green, who is best known to fans for his 2007 directorial debut HATCHET, is giving horror fans something a little deeper to fear this time than Victor Crowley.  He throws your worst fears at you during FROZEN and relentlessly holds you in a death-grip of emotional terror that doesn't let go until the film's conclusion. 

FROZEN shows that as a storyteller, Green has come into his own.  It's hard to make a horror film these days about three people on a chair with our culture of short attention spans, but somehow, Green makes it work.  A lot of that is credit to his script, creating characters that actually felt like people you know in your life (ironically enough, the three leads are named and somewhat based on friends of Green's- director Joe Lynch, director Dave Parker, and horror activist Spooky Dan Walker) and would want to root for. 

So many times, you see movies where you hope for the sake of entertainment that no one makes it out alive, but with FROZEN, you feel like you are sitting in that chair and you want these kids to make it. That feeling of immersion the audience gets in FROZEN is also due to the beautiful cinematography of Will Barratt, whose work captures the snowy Utah landscape with brilliant style and vision.

Both Bell and Zegers do a wonderful job of bringing their characters to life but it's Ashmore (THE X-MEN TRILOGY) who is the revelation in FROZEN.  For the first act, the trio struggle to come together- Lynch is hesitant to let Dan's girlfriend into the fold and Parker struggles to win Lynch over.  When the proverbial shit hits the fan and they have to dig deep to survive, that's when Ashmore shines.  At one point in the film, he gives a speech about his life-long friend Dan, and you just feel it in your core.

FROZEN is not your average horror film.  There's no nudity, no excessive gore, no slashers. If you aren't into character studies, then you might want to skip the flick.  But, if you are looking for horror with heart (which is possible), FROZEN is right up your alley.  It's hard to imagine that I could find a movie that would make me both squeamish and sob at the same moment, but that just shows that FROZEN is a film not to be missed.

I haven't been this terrified of snow since I saw THE SHINING.

Rating:

4.5 out of 5

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