Frozen (2010)

This was Open Water 2 on a ski lift.

Tempted as I am to let that one sentence be my entire review of this movie - because honestly, there's nothing more to it at all - I'll continue. There's just too much fun to be had here for me not to elaborate a little bit. But like I was saying, this is Open Water 2 on a ski lift. Three college kids, two bros and one's girlfriend, bribe a ski lift operator to take them up the mountain one last time even though an inclement storm is forcing the ski place to close early. There's some sort of miscommunication and no one knows that the three friends are still riding the lift up and all of a sudden, bam, the lift gets powered down and the lights go out and we get to spend an hour watching panic set in, and then despair, and then of course grizzly and comical death. But as is the case in any crappy situational thriller, it's not the deaths themselves that matter; it's the utter stupidity of the heroes. Keith went over this in length in his review of Open Water 2, and it's equally true here. Let's say you're stuck on a ski lift with some friends in freezing temperatures and you know you'll be stuck up there all week if you don't find a way to get free. (Suspend this much disbelief, at least.) Personally, I'd have the lightest and most capable person in the chair ditch his or her skis or snowboard, climb atop the chair, and rope crawl the length of the cable to the nearest pole, climb or slide down that pole, and then go get help at the bottom of the mountain. (This does actually happen in the movie, but it isn't until one guy dies, and it has all sorts of highly improbable ramifications. We'll get there.)

Anyway, what you probably wouldn't do is drop three stories or so onto the hard part of the track. One guy does this. Can you guess what happens next? That's right; both of his legs snap and he winds up sitting there with bones poking through each of his knees. Can you guess how he reacts to this? Somehow, he does not pass out from shock or bleed out right away. Instead, he screams in agony for a while. And then something amazing happens.

Wolves eat him.

A pack of man-eating wolves running around on a mountain that has been converted into a ski resort just kind of come out of nowhere and eat our noble but stupid wounded warrior. The two remaining friends in the chair just kind of hug each other in horror while it happens; once it's over though, they have almost no reaction to what must be a truly horrifying sight: their dead friend's half-eaten carcass just kind of sitting there below them. The camera, too, strategically avoids focusing on this whatsoever, and for the rest of the movie - which takes place in the same exact physical location - no such corpse is seen. Hey, whatever - maybe the wolves ate him bones and all? I guess it's a moot point; the rest of the movie contains all kinds of events that make you almost forget that a half-eaten body should be in most of the shots. Almost.

The two remaining idiots fall asleep. Can you guess what greets them when they wake up the next morning? If you guessed "rescue," you'd be wrong. The correct answer is frostbite. Yeah. The girl's hand is stuck to the guardrail - did I forget to mention that she lost her glove lighting a cigarette the night before? - and a neat little square patch on one side of her face is a deep scabby purple. When she tries to tear her hand free from the metal bar, chunks of her skin get ripped off. The guy's hands are puffy and swollen and cut up. They play a little bit of the blame game and argue over whose fault it is that they're in this tight spot with their friend dead. They resolve nothing. Can you guess what happens next? I guarantee you, you cannot.

The girl pisses herself.

She just starts peeing. A close-up shot of her white-panted crotch shows the dampness spreading down her thighs. Then comes a puddle. Then some dripping off the edge of the seat. This plays no role going forward whatsoever. I just felt like mentioning it because, hey, someone felt like putting it into a gimmicky horror movie.

Okay, we're running out of time; there are only twenty minutes left in the movie and there are still two living people. Now the second guy can try my plan of shimmying down the lift cable to a pole, descending, and then running to retrieve help. Except that rather than swing his legs up and shimmy down the cable - an arduous but fairly non-demanding exercise - he just fucking swings his way down the cable hand over hand in what can only be considered an amazing feat of upper body strength for a guy who hasn't eaten in a day. But while he's doing this, slowly making his way toward the pole, something incredible happens. A real game-changer, if you will.

The bolts holding the chair onto the cable just kind of give way.

Seriously. No one has been putting added pressure or strain on those things. No one has been picking at them or unscrewing them. The chair simply starts to come loose from the cable. This is weird an unlikely for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that the chair is currently holding the weight of just the girl when this occurs, after having supported the weight of all three friends for hours. Anyway, this new development adds a bit of a time constraint to the guy's mission to get down the mountain. He gets to the pole, climbs down, and - WOLVES! Again! But unlike his buddy, this guy's got working legs and some ski poles; he swipes and stabs a few times and ultimately drives the wolves away before racing away, promising to get help.

Another night passes. Our girl - who has been dangling precariously all fucking night on that unscrewed chair, mind you - realizes she's not getting any help. She needs to get down herself, or she gonna straight up die. There are only ten minutes left in the movie now, so we really need some sort of deus ex machina to speed things up. We get exactly that when the chair finally falls from the cable, only to be caught in mid-air by the thin cable with which it was connected to the thick cable.

Wait. What? I'm positive that's not how chairlifts work. I'm confident that you don't attach the chairs to the larger cables with coiled up smaller cables. (I'm also confident that chairs don't simply "unscrew" and come loose from those bigger cables in the first place, but whatever.) At any rate, the result of this oddly designed chairlift just falling apart out of the blue is that our girl has now been lowered most of the way to the ground, and she's merely a small drop away from freedom.

Let me reiterate. What ends up saving the girl from the chairlift is the chairlift itself breaking and doing so in a very weird fashion. Honestly!

The girl belly-crawls down the slope. I don't know why - her legs work fine and if it's energy she's concerned with, well, she's got two perfectly good snowboards to use as sleds - but I no longer care. She passes the half-eaten corpse of the second guy. Yeah, turns out the wolves got him after all. And then she passes the wolves themselves. Again, she's crawling around on her stomach. But the wolves, for whatever reason, ignore her completely. If you ask me, I don't think the wolves were written with consistent character traits. The girl slip-slides her way down to a highway and just kind of passes out in the middle of the road where she is rescued and brought to a hospital and the movie ends. The utterly incompetent and frostbitten smoker who makes no real effort to save the group at any point in the movie ends up being the lone survivor because of course she does!

Wow!

Look, this was clearly always going to be a silly movie, and I hold no grudge against it in the least for being exactly what I figured it would be. To be honest, I even got a small sense of guilty pleasure out of this one; I figured, heading in, that someone would get awful frostbite and that someone would fall from the chairlift and break their legs. What I didn't count on was a murderous wolfpack; that part was just icing on the cake. You don't watch movies like this hoping for memorable characters or even a harrowing experience; you watch them for the plot holes and the idiocy of the main characters. In a weird way, watching such a dumb movie makes you feel better about your own intelligence. In that strange way, tis movie lived up to every single expectation I had and in some ways exceeded them all. And really, how many movies can you say that about? Don't take that as a recommendation though; don't see Frozen. Life is too short.

I'll leave you with the greatest line in the movie, spoken unironically and non-sarcastically by the skier when the snowboarder asks him if he'll ever make the transition to snowboarding: "Please. Snowboards are too emo for me."