Frozen (2010)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Parker O'Neill	Emma Bell
Dan Walker	Kevin Zegers
Joe Lynch	Shawn Ashmore	½

Review

Frozen, the latest chiller from up-and-coming filmmaker Adam Green (Hatchet, Spiral) tells the story of three 20-somethings who spend a Sunday at an alpine ski resort in New England where they after a long day steal one final ride up the chairlift right before closing-time to secure maximum value for their money, only for the lift to stop midway and the resort shutting down, leaving the three friends suspended in their chair high above the slope in freezing cold conditions.

Anyone who has some experience with chairlifts will recognize the partly claustrophobic, partly acrophobic sensation you get when your lift stops, even if it normally is only for a couple of minutes. In the case of these people, the situation is much more dire, and there is a tangible, gripping realism in the situation our three protagonists find themselves in; facing the prospect of being stuck in the freezing cold for days. Unfortunately, the film is badly marred by the continued stupidity of the characters (and the script). Their lack of resourcefulness, logical thinking and common sense is so annoying that it drains whatever empathy we felt for them. The girl, for instance, actually falls asleep in freezing weather with her bare hand clenched around a metal bar - that is just about as easy to do as falling asleep by a camp fire with your hand in the flames. Green's inclusion of a pack of freakish wolves doesn't help the case either; evolution killed off wolves with this kind of aggressive behaviour thousands of years ago.

If logical fallacies were to make or break horror films, there would be few movies left that worked, but in the case of Frozen, the fallacies are too substantial to ignore, because the film bases its entire existence on a few choices made by the characters. Director Adam Green's approach is utterly cynical: keeping logic from his characters in order to enable him to drag them through the most gruesome endeavours. I would propose for Green to remake his film as a nice 30-minute short with the following ending: three friends find themselves stuck in a chairlift, lights go out and they face a freezing night (which most probably would mean their death) unless they find a way down. They put their heads together as their human survival instincts kick in, and start making a rope using their jackets, skiing trousers and Joe's poles from which the lightest of the three (Parker) lowers herself to the ground and rides down on her board to fetch help so that a rescue team can return to save the other two and they can all go home and get some pizza.