I imagine Adam Green's highly buzzed Frozen might have played more effectively when it unspooled at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah at the base of a mountain not unlike the one that basically serves as the villain in this "Open Water on a chairlift." Who says there are no new ideas in the world of horror? Give Green (director of the cult hit Hatchet) credit for at least half-realizing a new arena for chills and spills, but Frozen is a flawed short film stretched to the breaking point at only ninety minutes and it's not a very effective one at that. Despite this ski outing's significant flaws, Green is still a talented director who knows how to milk a moment for all its gory value and I believe he has yet to produce his best work. Frozen is far from awful, it just has too many flaws to deliver on its undeniably original set-up.

only works if you can identify with basically the only three people in the film (except, of course, the requisite Kane Hodder cameo) and that never happens. They're bickering from the beginning and Green is a much better director than a writer. To be blunt, the dialogue in Frozen is awful. And we have to hear a lot of it during the padded-like-a-snowsuit set-up. It's twenty-three minutes until the inciting incident and while I usually appreciate character-building, when it's through dialogue that sounds more juvenile than a CW soap it would have been better off without it.

Some confusion at closing time forces Dan, Joe, and Parker to get stuck on the chairlift halfway up the mountain, high in the air, and with bad weather coming in. Before they realize how screwed they are, they're self-referentially talking about being eaten alive by wild animals. Cue the wolves. And then they talk about heights. Then the lights go off, they realize that it's Sunday night and the mountain doesn't re-open till Friday, and the screaming, crying, and freezing begins. (One hint to anyone potentially stuck in this situation – don't fall asleep in a snowstorm anywhere near a metal bar.)

Green oddly offers little spatial perspective, shooting most of the action from the ground or the front of the lift, losing the chance at vertigo and giving the viewer no real sense of the actual height. He should have spent way more time in the chair immediately after the lights go off to build tension. Why the twenty minutes of build and then there’s a blizzard ten minutes after they're stuck? He drags out the opening but then makes the rest of the film feel like it takes place in real time. There's no sense of hours passing on the actual chair. We all know that it would be the prospect of increasingly deadly minutes ticking by that would be the most mentally draining and lead to some really bad decisions.

There are elements of Frozen that work. Kudos to Green's sound design team, one that cleverly plays with wind and creaking chair sounds. They also know how to make a body being eaten by wolves crunch in a thoroughly effective way. The makeup team deserves praise as well for the truly disgusting moments involving frostbite and the aforementioned skin on metal scene that reportedly made Sundance audiences nauseous. There are so many elements of Frozen that work from a technical standpoint that it allows one to hold out hope for what Green does next. Perhaps next time he'll make it up the mountain instead of getting halfway there.

Rating: TWO BONES

Release Date: February 5th, 2010
Rating: R

Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Kevin Zegers, and Emma Bell
Director: Adam Green
Writer: Adam Green