Movie Review: Frozen

 Okay, let's get right to the point on this one: STINK BOMB!!!

It would be great if someone scrolled down to the Amazon link and actually ordered this movie so I can pick up some cash on the Amazon Affiliates program, but I won't blame you if you don't. I can't recommend this to anyone, under any circumstances, ever.

I was somewhat enthused to see Shawn Ashmore (Iceman from the X-Men movies) cast in this, somewhat against type. You see, in this film he plays kind of an arrogant, selfish prick. That would be fine, if he was the only one. Unfortunately, he and the other two leads are all arrogant and selfish. They are unintelligent, uninteresting, and unsympathetic. In other words, this is a "horror movie" (really more of a suspense flick than horror) in which you don't really care what happens to anyone.

It is a tradition in many horror films to make the victims somewhat unsympathetic, even unlikeable. Wes Craven's Scream franchise explained this in the sense of the "virgin principle"; in other words, in order to survive the dangers of the horror movie's plot, one must be pure and virtuous. One ends up rooting for Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13th  because his victims are reprehensible little dimwits who only care about drinking and fornicating. Slasher movies are messed up morality plays in which "sin" is punished by the killer, making the nominal bad guy into the symbolic good guy. There are often exceptions to the rule; good people do often die in such movies; that's a plot twist to keep you guessing.

Enough Horror Movie 101. Frozen has few, if any of these qualities. The people in it are so thoroughly unsympathetic that you really, really don't care if they die. You look forward to it, but not enough to sit through most of the movie to see it happen. Let's keep this simple, as I've already spent longer writing about this movie than I would have liked to have spent watching it: three spoiled college kids go skiing. These punks don't have enough money for lift tickets, and they went to a ski resort knowing they didn't, but they just planned to scam some cheap tickets out of one of the resort's employees. They get the tickets by having the only girl flirt with the guy very unconvincingly. Then they ride the lift and talk a lot. Later, when a bad storm is blowing in and the mountain is being closed to skiers (at night, no less) they pressure the same resort employee to let them go up the lift one last time. At night. In a storm. At closing time. And then the guy switches with another guy, they lose track of whether or not anyone's on the lift, blah blah blah. The three stupid, frivolous college kids get stuck up on the lift after it's shut down (along with all the lights on the mountain), in the dark, as a severe winter storm is blowing in. The "horror" and danger originate with their need to get down off the lift (to high to jump, as one character learns) before they freeze to death. I'm sure in real life, ski resorts probably have safety protocols to prevent this sort of thing happening, but not being a skier I can't really work up any concern about it.

Either way, by the time these kids get themselves into this situation you can not only see disaster approaching, you don't see how they can fail to see it. This is not a yell-at-the-screen, so-bad-it's-good kind of predictable horror movie. It's just plain bad, and rather than yell at the characters to "Look out!' or "Don't go in there!", you'll just want to turn it off.