FROZEN never even comes to life. This is the type of premise I would have bought when I was a movie producer – in fact I developed a concept not dissimilar from this in its icy wasteland setting. The idea is simple and could be enormously effective if put in competent hands: three young skiers, a couple and the guy’s best friend who is the putative third wheel, are assumed to be off the mountain as a storm approaches a ski resort. They are 50 feet above the ground in the middle of nowhere on a ski lift when it grinds to a halt, and they’re stuck. They survive the storm, but then the wolves gather beneath their T-bar car. So far, so good, but then the movie really begins. The characters have been set up in simplistic fashion and are played even more stupidly by the very disappointing Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers, but the danger seems very real. Creative matters in the hands of writer-director Adam Green go to pieces faster than the subjects do at the cruel wintry hand of fate. It all begins and ends, in this case, with the script: there are no characterizations beyond “what you see is what you get”; there are no dynamics explored despite a ripe situation in which two men and one woman are trapped together in one seat as if they’re on a carnival ride; and there seems to be no coherent plan among the characters for escape. What that leaves is numbingly familiar dialogue, awful special effects when the unlucky Zegers decides to be the first to jump, and little or no tension. Someone should be sentenced to movie jail for blowing the potential of this premise, and Green seems the logical candidate. I did not see his earlier film HATCHET (2006), but from what I gather, the setup is similar, only placed on a swamp tour in the Louisiana bayous. The gore in FROZEN is actually minimal, and when I heard rumors of people fainting at its Sundance premiere I kept waiting for the shocker sequence that never came – if people were upset by an off-screen attack by the wolves, then gore cinema isn’t what it used to be. I kept trying to imagine this film in the hands of a good suspense director like Joseph Ruben who did THE FORGOTTEN (2004) and THE STEPFATHER (1987), not to mention a master like Alfred Hitchcock or Roman Polanski. Hitchcock actually tried something similar to FROZEN with LIFEBOAT (1944) – how do you keep a film visually and dramatically interesting in a very limited space? The answer, of course, was brilliant writing and dialogue by John Steinbeck, Jo Swerling and an uncredited Ben Hecht. Green has, well, Adam Green and that’s the major problem. If you don’t care about young people who are about to be devoured by wolves, if in fact you wish the wolves would be a little more interested in the task at hand, then the filmmakers have failed on a very basic level. Emma Bell is quite good in the new Frank Darabont zombie series on AMC, The Walking Dead but she’s just terrible in this, and she is given nothing to play against by Zegers in his brief time in the cable car, or Ashmore, who just glowers through most of the movie when he’s not leering at Rileah Vanderbilt, the ski bunny waiting for him back at the lodge. Is it just another coincidence that he played Bobby Drake, better known as Iceman in X MEN: THE LAST STAND (Brett Ratner, 2006)? He had more personality under all that ice than he does in 90 minutes of FROZEN. And while I don’t like to kick a film while it’s down, is it really believable that Ashmore would try to survive three days in a freezing landscape, beset by storm after storm, and never put up his hood? That was enough for me. Keep FROZEN in the video Deepfreeze.

Dir: Adam Green, 2010. 91 mins. Anchor Bay Films. Produced by Peter Block, Cory Neal. Screenplay by Green. Cinematography by Will Barratt. Edited by Ed Marx. Production design by Bryan McBrien. Music by Andy Garfield. With Emma Bella, Shawn Ashmore, Kevin Zegers, Ed Ackerman, Rileah Vanderbilt, Kane Hodder, Adam Johnson, Chris York. Viewed on DVD.