Freeze

I sat down with a friend to watch this believing it to be a monster horror film. My friend will watch almost anything, the worst TV shows, low budget garbage, really anything at all, but 15 minutes into this and he asked to turn it off. It really is that bad. This movie , in what we saw, has nothing going for it. There is no atmosphere of horror, it looks like they could only afford partial costumes for some of the cast, the acting was like bad dinner theatre, the one female cast member had a modern haircut and looked like she stepped in from some other film, the monsters looked like cheap knock-offs from the Creature from the Black Lagoon films, and everything about this looked cheap and amateurish. Had we continued watching maybe it would have become a so bad it's funny movie, but my friend who'll watch the worst junk out there insisted we give up and I agreed.

Well, I've seen it. You need to see it, otherwise you would not believe that something like this is possible in the year of 2022. If this movie would have been shot, let's say in 1925, it might, perhaps, have been a mediocre movie, despite the bad acting, the ridiculous monsters and the obvious disregard of the fact, that it is cold, in fact, freezing, when all around you is covered with snow, and so on., I do wonder who was willing to finance such a disaster, and find actors desperate enough to participate in such a movie. I guess the producer must be a very convincing person with an hypnotic aura.

I used to believe I'd happily watch any old crap if it was connected to the Lovecraft mythos. I don't believe that anymore.

There's this constant sense that you're watching adults perform in a film written and directed by precocious children. Emotional reactions and behaviour are unconvincing, to put it charitably, and you don't have to know the specifics of history to instinctively know that those uniforms, those guns, that ship, Beatrice Barrilà's hair, the Zippo lighter, a grammaphone and the pastiche of 1930s-ish orchestral jazz that's playing on it do not remotely fit together in the same year. Anything is allowed to be here as long as it's vaguely old-timey; why make any more effort than that? And that's before the captain starts Duke-Nukeming quips such as "Eat this!" or the movie's cackling villain tells the captain that his "puny human brain can't concieve" of how good and fun his plan will be, mwa-ha-ha-haaaa. That's not even the only time that character says "puny human". It's so bad.

The only reason those costumes are here - really, the only reason this film exists - is because of season one of The Terror (which, lest we forget, was set in the 1840s). It's painfully obvious. Every diversion the plot tries to make from that can only be made via yet another crudely impersonated drama: Apocalypse Now, Aliens, The Thing. Please don't think, "Hey, I like all of those things!" You won't like this. When you're watching a Deep One wriggle on the spot as if there's a musical number playing, it'll also put you in mind of The Mighty Boosh. It's hard to square the idea that this monster type is your evolutionary superior with the visual appearance of a Halloween house worker.

Cliché-riddled community theatre, and it can't even be bothered to complete its very simple mission by the time the credits roll.

Pure garbage!

This movie starts off with 35 minutes of pointlessness.

That's act 1. I don't want to write spoilers here so I'll just tell you it doesn't get better, it gets worse and worse and worse.

The plot holes are massive. I mean you would have to suspend all reality of society to believe some of the things that occur to set up the "story" or "plot" or whatever this thing is.

There are other parts where you will just shake your head and ask: Why. That's the main question. This is utter nonsense. Unless you're into watching a plot that moves in ways that confuse you and make you annoyed, I would avoid this movie. Not good.

I don't know anything about the Lovecraft Mythos, so I'm a complete neophyte who just likes a decent creature feature. This film didn't disappoint. For such a low budget movie, they pulled off a pretty good effort. The acting is passable, the sets were convincing enough, and the plot was engaging. Not great, but you could do far worse.