Frozen (2010)
Average Rating: 5.8/10
Reviews Counted: 88
Fresh: 53 | Rotten: 35
Writer/director Adam Green has the beginnings of an inventive, frightening yarn in Frozen, but neither the script nor the cast are quite strong enough to truly do it justice.
Average Rating: 4.4/10
Critic Reviews: 24
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 17
Writer/director Adam Green has the beginnings of an inventive, frightening yarn in Frozen, but neither the script nor the cast are quite strong enough to truly do it justice.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 17,724
My Rating
Movie Info
A typical day on the slopes turns into a chilling nightmare for three snowboarders when they get stranded on the chairlift before their last run. As the ski patrol switches off the night lights, they realize with growing panic that they've been left behind dangling high off the ground with no way down. With the resort closed until the following weekend and frostbite and hypothermia already setting in, the trio is forced to take desperate measures to escape off the mountain before they freeze to
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Cast
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Emma Bell
Parker O'Neil -
Shawn Ashmore
Joe Lynch -
Kevin Zegers
Dan Walker -
Ed Ackerman
Jason -
Rileah Vanderbilt
Shannon -
Kane Hodder
Cody -
Adam Johnson
Rifkin -
Christopher York
Ryan -
Peder Melhuse
Driver
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Frozen Trailer & Photos
All Critics (88) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (54) | Rotten (35) | DVD (9)
Adam Green's taut, toe-curling survival thriller is better than it should be: the concept and the characters' behaviour are mostly plausible, the script is dark and funny, the acting is adequate, and the wildlife scenes are convincing.
Top CriticThere's not enough here for 90 minutes.
Frozen is good for five minutes of "What would you do if?" games. Then it's just stiff as a board.
A stuck chairlift just doesn't exert the same primal terror as a roiling sea, and to make up the difference, Green would need a better cast and sharper dialogue than he has here.
Another date movie-horror flick designed to scare tentative couples into each other's arms.
Tthe script is clunky, the acting strained. Too bad. Underlying the life-and-death thriller are notions about the ways coupledom changes and challenges friendships.
Green avoids Hatchet's corny clichés and totally redeems himself with a harrowing portrait of humans at the mercy of the great outdoors.
Characters possess serious lack of thinking ability and survival skills. Even when it comes to stuff like zipping up their coats all the way.
Adam Green's fun 2006 horror film Hatchet revelled in the art of self-aware pastiche, but it is in his second major work that he has found a legitimately great concept out of which to wring more nuanced thrills.
The parts of the film that work are flat-out fantastic. There just aren't enough of them.
Like Jack London's 'To Build a Fire,' this is an exercise in extracting suspense from the circumstances of a harsh wintry environment and a bad situation rather than imposing danger in the form of an outside (and potentially vanquishable) foe.
Green?s nifty framing, dawning-dread pacing, and fixation on corporeal deterioration proves sturdy.
The characters, situation, and dialogue are stretched a bit thin.
While making the occasional narrative misstep, this is effective low-budget filmmaking, and undoubtedly a notch better than what usually passes as suspense these days.
Frozen is a ludicrous, uneven horror film that still successfully puts the screws to the audience.
The movie has a good flow, and it understands how to generate thrills, but the characters, situation and dialogue are stretched a bit thin.
Green orchestrates all this with some skill but not too much gore. A minor tour de force.
However much fun it is to watch, it's a lot more fun to pull it apart afterwards.
Sustains interest and tension with some inventive plotting and gratuitous misfortune, aided by a cast convincingly scared witless, even if their characters left me, well, rather cold.
Armed with an appealingly pared-down premise, Frozen effectively establishes itself as one of the best horror films of its kind to come around since Open Water.
Impressively directed and genuinely suspenseful, this is a hugely entertaining thriller with a superb script and terrific performances from its three leads.
This minimalist thriller offers the same endurance-test nightmare as Open Water, only here the imperilled characters are marooned on a mountain, and wolves substitute for the sharks.
Fiendish, sweaty and tense as hell. One to watch through the fingers.
With believable characters, a real sense of terror and that terrific whatwould-you-do? plot, Frozen works on every level. A proper chiller.
The taut set-up is enjoyable all by itself, but it's the rising tide of three-way recriminations and despair that gives this film emotional clout.
Audience Reviews for Frozen
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Dan Walker: You know how I said I did this before...? I haven't and I'm scared shitless.
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- Dan Walker: Dan, why don't I ever have a girlfriend? Why?
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- Joe Lynch: Hmmm, smell that mountain air. You know what it smells like?... Cancer.
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February 4, 2010:
Critics Consensus: From Paris With Love Is Not BonThis week at the movies, we've got Gallic gunplay ( From Paris With Love, starring John Travolta and...
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I desperately wanted to like this movie. But I couldn't. It's not a great start to a review but I honestly think Frozen is a hugely creative horror thriller, when director Adam Green was shooting it I bet there wasn't a single angle shot in the compressed environment in which the story is set that he didn't capture on camera. But despite the creativity and the genius of it's spine tingling premise, it doesn't deliver as many scares as you think it would. To put it simply, horror only ever works when you care about the characters who are stuck in the horrifying situations that are shown on screen, and in the case of Frozen I never got gripped into the illusion that the actors were in any real danger. If a film with a plot like this never appears believeable then everything else at some point falls apart. I think the key reasons why it never becomes interesting or suspenseful, and instead get's fairly predictable is down to the fact that the cast is poor and so is the script. It's undeniable that it's beautifully shot and very well-directed but the writing and the characters are the problem. In the right hands this film could have followed in the footsteps of tight thrillers like Phone Booth but since I never found the characters interesting enough to sympathise for them it never felt as terrifying as the thought of being trapped on a ski lift in the middle of the night myself. However it's not a bad film by a major stretch, there are a couple of moments of small scares and truly extraordinary make up and gore effect design but it's never as fist-gnawingly petrifying as it needs to be to work as a solid horror picture.