Movie Review: Frozen (US film)

Usually something that sucks this much and so well would be consideredhot.

Some of my favorite films are, frankly, atrocious. One of them is the 1983 comedy disaster (not disaster film)Yellowbeard , starring Monty Python’s Graham Chapman as the most magnificentlydriven pirate to ever be seen on film:

Dan: Look, if you cut my head off it’ll start to putrefy!

Yellowbeard: Do what?

Dan: Putrefy, go rotten!

Yellowbeard: Yeah, it would ooze a lot, heads do. But I can live with that.

Dan: Everyone will be following you and if they catch you they’ll have the map.

Yellowbeard: Bugger them! I’ll eat it first. Won’t be the first head I’ve eaten.

Monty Python member Eric Idle, who has a supporting role in the film, says its not the worst film he’s made, but it is definitely on the list. At the same time, Idle notes that “sometimes, the best times can be on the worst movies and vice versa, e.g.,Yellowbeard, which I wouldn’t have missed for the world.”

Well, in that spirit, I can say that one of my best filmgoing experiences occurred while watching what may be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Frozen sucked a golf ball through a garden hose.

The only reason I went to see this film was because it was free.

Well, that and because I went to see it with Mimi Leung, artist extraordinaire, painter of two of my (favorite) guitars, and generally great person to hang around with.

Frozen tells the story of three immature, self-absorbed f@#$wits who get stranded on a ski lift in New England.

Hypothermia, bickering, and wolves ensue.

The fact that they have connived to pay off a lift attendant rather than pay for lift tickets may or may not have anything to do with their predicament.

The film is so poorly written that I couldn’t be sure.

But what do I know, I justteach film studies . I’ve never written a scrīpt for an independent American film.

Actually, I have. It got optioned by Paramount, but the producer died. A sign if ever there was one.

Frozen is so laughably bad in so many ways that it became the comic film of the year. It was barrels of fun to sit and watch this grand failure while sharing a constant stream of asides with Mimi.

For the record, there are very, very few wolves in New England. They live in the upper portions of Maine, far away from 99% of humans,  and not even they will brazenly attack humans in broad daylight.

No woman ever born (not even a white one) would spend a frigid winter night on a ski lift with her bare hand not only outside of a pocket, but eventually gripping a metal bar so that her hand gets frozen to it. No woman would tear her hand loose either.

No decent director of any decent film would then forget to keep the flesh on the bar no more than a scene later, as if ravens  swooped down to nibble this frozen delicacy off the bar, thus leaving it as clean as it was before Dumbelina put her hand on it.

The same moronic director then has this woman fall asleep with her face on another bar, but forgot that it would stick. As would her hand when she later grabs bars aplenty.

Apparently no one ‘wiki’-ed hypothermia to find out that its onset is accompanied by drowsiness, such that one of the last things people should do is GO TO SLEEP.

TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW.

If/when a person ends up urinating themselves in freezing conditions, it would, within hours, exacerbate hypothermia. Apparently, making this pooor woman p*ss herself was horrible enough, since her wet clothes didn’t seem to make her any colder.

No one seemed to get very hungry, or even talk about it. Maybe the director explicitly told the actors the same thing he implicitly told the audience:

Eat sh*t.

This film was such crap that when one of the characters gets eaten alive by wolves (two words, Director F@#$cheese: Discovery Channel), I was howling (!) with derisive laughter.

I nearly wet myself. But it’s September in Hong Kong, I’d have been okay.

Of course,Frozen didn’t endear itself to this New Englander because it was filmed in Utah. And these three people had no trace of a real New England accent.****

This was noGoodwill Skiing .

The film also committed the by-now (for me) standard error of being populated by characters  Iloathed .

Within five minutes, I wanted these people to die slowly with the taste of their own blood in their mouth, screaming futilely for their mother.

At first I thought it was some generational thing, but Mimi is young enough to make the intended audience demographic and she hated them too. One more reason she is a great person to pass time with.********

This film was so badly conceived, written, acted, and directed that I really do struggle to see how anyone can watch this and not laugh.

*****Speaking of which, I felt, on occasion, a slight pang of guilt for being so talkative, especially since we were at the Grand in Elements.*

But I selfishly took it as payback for all the times I have to listen to people prattle through an entire film, or talk on their phone.

And at the very least,Frozen was so awful that I don’t feel bad, because I didn’t deprive people of anything they shouldn’t have been saved from anyway.

That said, it was all worth it to hang out with Mimi.