The horror/thriller/suspense/whatever genre tends to suffer from an inherent douchebaggery in its leads. When bad things happen to people with few redeeming qualities, we are sometimes hard-pressed to decide whether we are supposed to feel terror or satisfaction.
Adam Green’s Frozen is no different in this regard. Parker, Dan, and Lynch are three over-priviledged, overly-attractive college kids that make jokes about “retards” and treat “minimum-wage workers” as lower lifeforms put on this earth to serve them. One such lower lifeform is a ski lift operator, whom they bribe into letting them take one final lift before the resort prematurely closes due to an impending blizzard. Miscommunications ensue, and out terrible threesome is trapped some fifty feet above the ground, presumably for five days and nights until the park opens again.
Frozen’s scenes of terror are precisely that — terrifying. Aided by both a rather intuitive attention to sound editing and a not-too-entirely-unbelievable premise, it creates a frantic uncertainty in its first act, an unthinkable and macabre turn of events in its second, and a desperate, exhausting final fight for survival in its third. Sure, it’s Open Water on a ski lift, but even Green recognizes this enough to make cheeky mention of shark attacks in his film. Spice it up with a couple of songs by Helicopter Helicopter (an unsung but personal favorite of my indie rock early twenties), and Frozen gets my seal of approval.
Travis George
Travis George was born and raised in Carteret County, a seaside community in North Carolina's Outer Banks. In 2005, he made the inevitable twentysomething's pilgrimage to Portland, Oregon, where he studied American Sign Language and otherwise busied himself with the various cultural curiosities of the Pacific Northwest. In 2006, he began (inadvertently) to watch solely the films of the Criterion Collection. His marathon came to completion on June 18th, 2009 (at 477 films), and he continues to remain current with the new releases His arrangements and social relationships have suffered greatly. Travis makes a living delivering medical supplies, and plays in a folk band called The Ivonrose Family Jamboree (www.myspace.com/ivonrosefamjam). He is currently drafting a web comic which will launch in the upcoming month or two.