Ever been stuck somewhere and think "Wow, someone should make a movie out of this?" You usually follow it up with, "nah, how could you pad that out to 90 minutes?" and then forget it. Adam Green never made that second step.
Frozen, or Open Water on a Ski Lift, takes care of its running time issue by ensuring that the kids don’t actually get stuck til about a half hour in. So now we only need to pad our one idea out for an hour. The first thirty minutes are spent with artless filmmaking and CW-level banter similar to the equally pointless Hostel films. For a minute I thought the music on the soundtrack was ironic. Further into the film I discovered irony isn't really in Green's playbook.
Against all odds, though, Frozen isn't terrible. When the flat, inane characters shut their traps for a minute or two and the situation unfolds visually one can't help but empathize with the nightmarish scenario. My Lord, what would I do if I was left to die on a ski lift? Someone should make a movie about that!
What stinks is that there could have been something remarkable made from this. Some of the best sequences in all of cinema are simple man vs. his environment scenarios. Frozen is just a slightly more high concept version of Gus Van Sant's Gerry, a masterpiece of cinematic dread.
Frozen does have three or so cringeworthy moments that almost make this worthy of a group rental. Also shocking: somehow actress Emma Bell pulls a decent monologue out of her ear when she realizes how her dog back home will die thinking it was abandoned. That rare genuine moment of believability is seriously undercut, though, by the [SPOILERS!] preposterous presence of hungry wolves (where are they when the skiers are there?) or the fact that no one thinks to [ANOTHER SPOILER!] unhook the cushion they are all sitting on and fall whilst going limp.
I’d be more up in arms about the lapses in logic if I felt the film were more deserving of my passions.
