The Chilling

Woof! Pretty boring, and they might as well have shot it in black and white, it was so colorless.

The movie starts with rolling text explaining cryogenics, and asking whether god or Satan is behind it. There are some protests outside a cryogenics lab. Some people rob a bank, and many of the robbers and guards get shot. The father of one of the robbers (I think) arranges to have his son frozen. There's a lot of jumping around in the beginning from scene to scene introducing characters without us knowing how they relate.

There's a power outage, and the cannisters containing the frozen people get struck by lightning, and they emerge as zombies. They're all wearing silver mylar-like suits, and their skin is dark green and wrinkled (no idea why they look so bad - being frozen evidently didn't preserve their looks), and they have silver eyes. They go around killing people, sometimes lurching like zombies, sometimes moving like normal people.

Linda Blair keeps showing up every once in a while, to what purpose I'm not really sure. I think her character works at the cryogenics lab, but she's not very important to the plot, and her role is very small.

The movie ends with some freeze frames with text captions that tell us what happened to the characters next, which are pretty silly.

Alright, well I had no idea this movie was from 1989, I just saw the DVD cover, and it looked interesting enough. Anything with zombies usually has my attention right away. So I picked this movie up and went home to watch it.

Now, cryogenics is not a bad thing in a movie, but in this? Wow, what where they thinking? I thought that it was common knowledge that when you freeze something it is preserved in its present state. Yet, however, the bodies in this movie were decaying and rotten when they came out of the cryo tanks. What was up with that? Were the tanks not properly closed? Leaking? What was up with that...

The movie took well over 35 minutes before anything real interesting happened. And during these 35 minutes you are just sitting around waiting for something to happen, and you are acquainted with a bunch of dull and personality-depraved characters.

Okay, lightning strikes and it is one in a how many thousand chance of happening? I am not sure, but for lightning to strike over 11 times in the same place in a 5 meter radius that is just ridiculous. When that scene took place, the movie went downhill, and it went downhill fast!

Alright, moving on to the revived frozen dead, or zombies (let's call them what they really were). Some of the masks actually looked decent enough. But why where they all a murky color of brownish-green? And what was up with the glowing eyes? I just didn't get that. Moving on, how come some times the zombies were only able to stagger and walk with a limping gait, but other times they were able to run and jump? Pick one and stick with it, wow! Still not done here with the zombies, the sound they were making? Again, wow! It sounded like a young elephant in pain or a horse in labor. It was terrible.

The cover had Linda Blair on it, and right enough for that, sure her name is legendary for her role in "The Exorcist", but come on, that was back then, and her name was on the cover here just to lure people in.

For a horror movie, then "The Chilling" is really boring and uneventful. And I am sure for a 1989 movie, it wasn't even really scary back then. I remember having seen horror movies from the 80's that were far more scary; "C.H.U.D." for example.

"The Chilling" might be worth giving a chance if you are a fan of Linda Blair, but otherwise, there is nothing interesting to be had from this movie. Except for the ending perhaps, that was the lamest ending I have seen in ages.

When I decided to try watching a movie about cryogenic zombies ("cryonoids"), I wasn't expecting a whole lot. That's exactly what I got, and then even less. Aside from a shortage of special effects (squibs?) and a severe lack of any acting talent, "The Chilling" also sports the absolute worst script I've ever seen made into a movie. I had to stop the tape numerous times during the first 45 minutes in order to repair the damage done to my intellect for witnessing such atrocious dialogue as there is found here.

Furthermore, the collection of characters is so formulaic and one-dimensional it's ridiculous: the corrupt doctor; his assistant, played by Linda Blair (we know she's his "assistant" because he repeatedly refers to her by that title); the recently-widowed businessman with a heart of gold who develops a romantic interest with Blair's character; his criminal son; the Blair character's alcoholic, abusive, unemployed boyfriend, whom we are introduced to in the most contrived use of a flashback; and, of course, the rough, tough, bearded security guard who becomes the hero.

Apparently, the preserving fluid which some cryogenics lab uses on its bodies is highly conductive, naturally resulting in disaster when all of the lab's containers end up outdoors in a remarkable sequence of events during a lightning storm (on Halloween night, no less). As for the zombies themselves, if you enjoy watching people in green latex masks walking around in aluminum foil suits, then "The Chilling" is the movie for you. The zombie action is very weak at its best; the zombies' primary killing method seems to be grabbing people by the shoulders and shaking them to death. The businessman and the security guard do most of the zombie fighting, including a highly suspenseful scene of re-freezing the undead with liquid nitrogen. Let me tell you, the steel mill scene in "T2" has got nothing on "The Chilling" in portraying an enemy getting frozen in his tracks like that.

How Linda Blair ended up stuck in the middle of this piece of dreck is indeed a mystery. True, her career didn't exactly skyrocket during the 80s (sadly), but this movie is an embarrassment for her. The script doesn't even have the decency to put her to any good use. The most that her character is given to do is shriek out things like "Here they come", "Do something", "Hurry!". The only thing I can figure is that poor Linda was compensated for her work on this film in rations of food. The hero is played by Grizzly Adams himself, Dan Haggerty. In this picture, he faces stiff acting competition from his beard and the security dog, and he does his best to outperform them both.

The only frightening part of "The Chilling" is the introduction which brings up the factual elements of cryogenics and suggests that "the film you are about to see could happen in your own community". As I was counting the number of times a few of the names are repeated in the closing credits, I was floored to suddenly see Lucasfilm get credited. Fortunately, it was only for the movie's sound production. 1/10.

The idea of Linda Blair, Grizzly Adams and Troy Donahue in one direct-to-video movie would be pretty gold, even without zombies. Actually, it's the zombies that are a problem here--the movie never quite figures out how it wants to depict them, so it tries every approach half-heartedly. Can they talk? Do they hunger for flesh? How decayed are they? Do they remember their old lives? All these things seem to vary depending on the scene, and perhaps fluctuations in a budget that was probably never generous.

The film is almost a camp delight, with its weird moralizing that doesn't quite come out and say "Embrace the Lord Jesus Christ," but does repeatedly suggest that cryogenics are a tool of Satan- -a bizarre idea to take so fervently that it apparently fueled this whole project, or at least its clumsy script. Once the action finally kicks in, the pace is decent enough, but as a horror film this is rendered consistently silly by the very lame fight/stunt staging and feeble/scant gore.

The name actors would stand out even if they weren't "names," because this is one of those movies where almost everyone in a subsidiary role is very amateurish. (i was surprised to find that the male lead eventually paired with Blair wasn't an executive producer or something, because he is so old, plain and charisma-free that one would expect he must have gotten cast by contributing to the film's financing.) Linda Blair attempts sincerity under circumstances which certainly don't merit or reward it; Haggerty is laid-back and pleasant as usual, though he'd gotten pretty heavy-set at this point; Donahue at least seems to be enjoying himself, chewing the scenery as the villain.

More interesting to think about--why DOES this cheesy undead movie always seem on the verge of a sermon?--than to actually watch, "The Chilling" is one of those films you can't really recommend even as a guilty pleasure (though it'll do on a slow night). But conversely I'd LOVE to read someone's behind-the-scenes account of how it came to be made, and then made in a fashion that suggests possible drastic problems occurred during shooting and/or post-production. (It's not unimaginable that two directors are credited because one was replaced mid-production--and it's notable that while neither did much else, one of them did a later movie that was apparently a porn flick.) Anyway, it's a curio that's enough of a misfire to explain why it's so little-known despite the cult-ready combination of actors and genre.

I became Jack Sunseri's attorney just before this movie's "Grand Opening" at Oakland"s very grand Grand Theater. So my first view of the picture was on the big screen, which has got to be a different experience than seeing it on video.

I got a kick out of Troy's role which I think he did with tongue-in-cheek. Linda appeared not to be very into the picture.

Some have complained about the Zombi's being wrapped in foil but that is how they were wrapped when they went into the freezer units.

The idea was good and Jack should clean it up and try again if he is still in the game.

Jack did a pilot for TV which was much better than "Teletubbies", staring Dana Plato and a very funny cast. It should have made it.