Freeze

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.

The movie gives a nod to H. P. Lovecraft, and uses creatures that would be at home in a Roger Corman movie. It is not a movie of a ship being stranded in the Arctic for years, and their survival. Although they are in search of the crew and Captain Streiner, who set out to try and sail to the North Pole, so this was set in the 19th Century, with sailing ships. Their ship also get trapped in the ice, and then creatures, ichthyoids, come aboard and do some killing. What is left of the crew flees the ship, and there is also a woman who was a stowaway on the ship who also leaves. They are able to find a cave, which also has quite a few ichthyoids present, and they also find Captain Streiner, but his crew was all killed, but he managed to survive. The scenery is interesting, a vast snow wasteland, but when the people are outside, they really aren't dressed for the cold. Coats unbuttoned, no hats and only in one scene did they have gloves on. It could have been really interesting, but instead missed the mark.

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.

I love creature features, and Lovecraften horror. So the premise of this was pretty exciting, and they had nice details with the Lovecraften monster type drawings, but it had literally no atmosphere.

At no point did this film feel like a horror, there was no tension, any danger felt more like action adventure type fighting. The acting was next level bad, but even though some of the characters were ridiculous. It wasn't entertaining bad. Like the villain you know who he is the second he opens his mouth, because he is muhwhahahaha pantomime evil.

And the script and lines just felt really awkward.

The monster design is really generic and uninteresting, and were so obviously fake. All round it was just disappointing.

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.