Frozen Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS, COLD PREY 2

It's always nice to ride out the brutal chills of February with horror films more frozen than oneself. I'm writing this during the Winter Olympics and watching people shooting and skiing and luging and getting massive air on snowboarding can leave one feeling inordinately guilty for being so lazy and warm, but watching winter strand poor folks in the middle of nowhere, leading to the collapse of objective reality and fights for survival that for all you know may be already lost, that's cool. Go figure.

Here are four solid examples I've seen this week, some of which via streaming. So make sure the flask on the collar of your St. Bernard is filled with good brandy, board up and insulate the windows, keep the heater on and keep the generator close --so no thing or person can cut the power.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which have the gold now and forever. The Thing 1951, The Thing 1982, The Thing 2011 (here). And there's also a recent Netflix stream favorite, Pontypool (my praiseful review here). But why stop there - the cold night beckons.

COLD PREY

2006 - ***

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid gone snowboarding way off the Norwegian grid with a group of friends, but when one breaks his leg so they seek shelter at an abandoned ski lodge. But hey, it's not totally abandoned. And the generator still works. Cold Prey isn't ashamed of its generic slasher roots, and indeed builds up from the premise with measured quality, wit, and great moody dark cinematography that studiously avoids the usual dripping industrial torture basement look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' horrors. There's even some cozy ambience in the beginning, some tick-tock momentum, as the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, helping themselves to the booze on the mantle, starting a fire, goofing around but not in annoying American sneering perv kind of way. The film keeps unleashing ghoulish little surprises, the acting is solid through and through (characters interact and play off each other's dynamics very well) and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling. In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them. There's apparently a solid sequel that picks up where this leaves off (like Halloween II) and then a third that totally sucks (like Halloween VI).

WIND CHILL

2007 - **1/4

Emily Blunt plays a character few films realize exists: the old-before-their-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long (if the girl is hot, dudes will put up anything) she doesn't know how to stop. Now she has become so used to being alone she barely knows how to make a friend. I've been her friend, girls like that, one is even in one of my own movies! I can say that because I know she'll never read this, just like Blunt's character wouldn't. She's impervious to threat, she thinks, even accepting a ride from a creepy freshman (Ashton Holmes) home to Delaware for the holidays. Director Gregory Jacobs' film might have been creepy enough just from Ashton Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't actually live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that gradually fades away once they're stuck in a weird ghost time loop on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played in a way that sticks with you by Martin Donovan.

 Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two hander with a stalker and an antisocial narcissist, but along the way a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality overkills it. We can dig the way the collapse of the social sphere and disorienting symbolic structure can make one privy to the tricks of ghosts as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place. There isn't, but at least Blunt gets a chance to carry a film. The journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! 

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DEAD OF WINTER

 (AKA LOST SIGNAL)

2007 - ***1/2

Driving at night in wintery weather when you're tripping way too hard is a very nerve-wracking and bizarre experience, especially wearing smudgy glasses. For one thing, your 3-D space is way off so the road feels like it's just a 2-D postcard in your lap and the frost on the edges of your windshield seems to extend before you like a tunnel of ice.When the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat as the newly arrived colors prism through the salty windshield in extreme primary and secondary color blasts that come out of nowhere, like UFOs. Taking place over one long New Years night, the film follows a young couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) who do some shots they don't know are spiked with LSD at a New Years party, before splitting and having the drugs hit on the drive home. From there they get lost and wind up either killing or be killed-ing. This doesn't make too much sense as the couple does lines of coke at the party, so they should at least know they're high on something when they start hallucinating strange pursuers on the drive home (one never knows all the shit they cut coke with, such as meth, PCP, aspirin, or B-12, so has to be prepared), instead of abandoning their car and getting lost in the woods. But are they crazy or is someone really out to get them? Kudos to the film that for a fair chunk we cannot tell.

I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice effects in that vein. And I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors, who clearly have never been lost in the woods at night, or taken too much LSD or become convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them, or been feeling the pressure from ghost bathroom attendants to 'correct' his naughty wife and child. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching from behind some partition at the party and he represents your death, your psychopomp, and no one else can see him (you think). He's just a quiet dude at the party, he wishes! When you finally go up to confront him he turns out to be a mix of shadow and a macrame owl on the basement wall. Now you get scared because you don't know where your death went, he's not in your sights. You turn to the 1.75 of Old Granddad to wipe the electric madness from you with a soft black cloth, and if you're me, what do you put on the VCR to come down with once you finally get that car home? That's right. Pre-code Betty Boop cartoons.  and The Cocaanuts (1929). Train of thought, reverse!

Good as it all is, McNamara should have checked imdb before naming his film, there's about eighty movies called Dead of Winter. Lost Signal is a pretty weak title, too. May I suggest Acid Snow? Or Ice Tripping?

Another problem is how constant cutting back and forth to the toasty police station and various phone calls amidst law enforcement saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just shows up out of the darkness), and yet this is all apparently based on a true story, with recorded 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep, and anyone who's been to them at night, on psychedelics (or a spooked kid), knows how their ancient magic can bend reality and expose deep archetypal roots too vivid and real for normal adult daytime senses to decode (and, if their senses can't decode it, they tend to block it out as unimportant, even violently suppress those whose senses aren't so hindered). The hallucinations here are much less elaborate here than, say, the top shelf 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) but it tries, and that's what counts. Even without CGI or LSD, Dead of Winter allows us to can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see all the time, the fifth dimensional vortex intelligences of the woods, and how the trees are in on it. Which came first, the ghost or our ability to finally see it?! The only answer isn't.

The low budget is no problem in that regard and in its small way Winter is a sleeper little icicle of modernist ambiguity which anyone whose every been lost for hours whilst a mere block from their apartment or who appreciates the great works of modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like The Shining or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand what director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver are aiming for. These cats clearly know the full range of horrors that LSD in a receptive mind can create out of the winter sights and sounds, and having gone to college (and all that entails) up in wintry Syracuse I can authenticate their every last impression. Your mileage may vary but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up and Dead is, at least for a decent chunk, a great entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic horror genre, and one of those few and rare mysteries wherein we can't tell whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses, tree spirits) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces --and if quantum physics tells us anything it's that there is no difference.

 COLD PREY 2

2008 - ***1/2

The first was so good I had to go back for seconds, especially after learning that the sequel picks up right where the last one left off, ala Halloween 2, covering similar 'later that night' and following the final girl to the local hospital territory. Character development is solid, actors likable (no vile cliche like H2's sleaze bag goomba EMT), and the vibe and beautiful cinematography from the first film carry over flawlessly. The action takes its sweet time regrouping, chronicling the interaction of a sleepy little hospital in the process of closing, but there's a good sense of tick-tock momentum, and a vivid sense of the vast emptiness of Norwegian mountain regions. Those of us who have misgivings about the medical community's insistence on saving the lives of even psychopathic killers will be very pleased at the comeuppance rewarded the unexamined practice, and the crazy loner sociopath Viking murderer figure is a nice representation of the bloody past of the Norwegian people, rising up into the country's current sleepy socialized medication and education and uniform fraternal sophistication to smite the complacent youths. And it's pretty gratifying to see our heroine finally wise up and go all Ripley in Aliens. Nordics rock -- if you have any doubt about the Nordic awesomeness, just look at the high scoring teams of the Olympics -- Norway, especially. And then check out the whole issue of Acidemic devoted to their grace and hotness -- issue #7 - The Nordics. 

  DEVIL'S PASS

2013 - ***

Renny Harlin is back, his ear low to the ground, like an Indian! Has there been a director who's both made and lost so much money so fast? Now he's playing it a little wiser, ala recent work by De Palma, slim in budget, returning to an off-the-cuff approachwith no chance for budgetary bloating. Devil's Pass (written by Vikram Weet) is definitely lean and mean as a result, with a plot that combines elements of many other films including The Blair Witch Project melded to the very real mystery of the the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident. And there's rounds of wodka shots!

That's a good beginning but the thing about a great mystery like Dyatlov is that any 'answer' formulated in a fiction film is going to be a let-down. Harlin manages to keep the cameras whiplash-free and to ensure there's always some new layer to penetrate, and the acting is pretty top flight, especially Holly Goss in the "I gave you back the map" Heather role (she's brave, resourceful, and up for whatever). But Harlin never lets the inhospitable barren winterscape tear the fabric of objective social reality, and so the paralyzing fear associated with being unmoored from the symbolic order vanishes with the first explanatory note. In the future, Harlin, don't let the symbolic or explanatory contextualize the mystery! The refusal to commit to a set point of view about what's going on is part of what made Blair Witch and The Shining work so well. Explain it all with scrapbooks and old photos and the unknowable vanishes. If you can't handle the impossibility of objective truth you should never have looked farther than your own backyard, and certainly not ventured into the white abyss... that's for trippers with balls of ice!