Freeze Me

Rape revenge flick is just so quirky I don't even know what I thought of it.

Half way through this I found myself wondering what genre it was. Was it a horror? No, because it wasn't gruesome or scary enough. Was it a drama? No, because there was nowhere near enough depth to the story. Was it a thriller? No, because there was hardly any sense of thrills or tension on display.

This stumbling block is always going to be a huge problem. If you cannot classify a story under a specific category, or indeed multiple ones, then it becomes very hard to understand what kind of mindset to watch it in. If it's a thriller then it gets your pulse racing and you instantly 'activate' the mental recesses to put you into that frame of mind so you'll get the most out of it. Likewise horror, and one prepares oneself to be scared or disgusted or whatever. It's like real life - you're not going to elicit any inappropriate emotion for a given situation. You want to panic when you're being chased by a lion, not when you're settling down for a relaxing evening with your wife/husband.

With this, I was simply baffled as to how to feel.

Chihiro is a young lady who appears to have it all; a good job, an impending marriage to a man she's deeply in love with, and a solid social circle of friends. Indeed, she's in absolute bliss.

However, when a man she seems to recognise shows up at her apartment block, she runs from him in a state of panic, and a flashback of a scene from a home movie where the man's eyes dominate the picture appears. Evidently, she knows this man, and is terrified of him. Running back to her apartment she tries to get away from him, but he sticks to her like glue and takes over her home.

Essentially, it's safe to say that he (Kojima) is someone from Chohiro's past who she hoped never to see again.

That would be a synopsis and sets the stall for the movie. Well, so you would think. The problem I have with this review is the movie has very little content. Basically rapist #1 shows up, gets killed by the vilified woman, then his buddy shows up and the same happens, then the last one. And to store the bodies of these perps? Chohiro buys industrial freezers.

And that's it.

Obviously, there's an ending here, but you can see it coming a mile off and the events leading up to it are also as inevitable.

The major flaw with this movie is there are simply no layers to it. It's uninteresting because it never makes anything happen.

There's just so little plot that it makes rating it impossible, plus the added fact that it even adopts comedy at one point shows how completely directionless it actually is.

It's shallow, vacuous, and devoid of meat. However, it *is* different, and is extremely quirky as a result, which I must give it credit for.

However, add some overwrought rape scenes to the mix and you finish this movie entirely confused as to what you made of it.

I think more could have been done with the idea, and plenty more to make it plausible. Which is another flaw; to say you have to suspend your disbelief is an understatement. It's just absolutely incredible how daft much of this is. So many things happen which seem to abandon logic entirely, and they don't even succeed in entertaining given how utterly daft they are. You find yourself asking just why she is acting the way she is, why she is doing what she is doing.

Is it entertaining? Dunno. I suppose it killed (pardon the pun) a couple of hours but really, it was just so narrow.

Strange.

The rape-revenge genre is rife with dodgy exploitation pics and under-the-counter sleaze, with I Spit On Your Grave (Day of the Woman) being the most (in)famous and, possibly, the most misogynistic. Artistic merit is not something the rape-revenge film concerns itself with (let's face it, 'Last House on the Left' is a crude, artless fluke), concentrating more on graphic sex / nudity for graphic sex / nudity's sake. Oh, and the rape has to be really horrible to justify the rapists' sticky end (no pun intended).

If you're watching a good example of the genre, you'll be putting yourself in the place of the woman and relating to her, something the horror genre frequently does (it's one of the only genres where men will relate to a woman) and wishing her attackers dead - in any way possible, not necessarily in a sensationalist way.

I think Freeze Me (or Freezer, here in the UK) succeeds in this, as the plight of the female character is always put first. Agreed, there are a lot of gratuitous shots of her naked body, but these act as a reminder to her beauty and frailty. When it comes to the rape, it is often more implied and in no way staged to be titillating, something the more dubious examples try to achieve, rather disturbingly.

Freeze Me, therefore, isn't exactly an enjoyable experience (I'll have to look up the word 'entertainment'), but it is thought-provoking, well-made on a very tight budget, and incredibly disturbing. One of the best examples of this horror sub-genre.

Freeze Me is Ishii's best film since Gonin, and displays all of the characteristic visual finesse, pacing and editing skills which give him his reputation. A rape-revenge film is hard to do and stay on the right side of comfort: too often the female victim is exploited and seem to 'enjoy' the violent assault, while the (usually male) viewer is encouraged to oogle at the exposed, yielding flesh. Not that I am against exposing the female form, and certainly Ms Inoue is frequently very nice to look at, but it is to Ishii's credit that the crimes are shown as undoubtedly painful, and as humiliating as they surely would be. Apart from some nudity in the plentiful bath and shower scenes, perhaps as a sop to the burger crowd, her unpleasant ordeal is filmed with full sympathy for the victim. The video of her orginal rape is a necessary intrusion, but even here it is in its proper place, viewed as as a flashback not, as it must have been tempting to do, as a over-the top-first act, pileing cruelty on cruelty.

Set mostly within Chihiro's small apartment, Freeze Me quickly assumes a claustrophobia which is a chilly and as constricting as one of her newly acquired deep freezes. Within this setting, the three principal killings are staged with sufficient variety and flair to make them distinctive. A stand out is the bath tub killing, a magnificently staged murder which is amongst the best minutes in the film, while the death twitches of the second rapist's legs reminded me of a similarly shocking moment in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

If the basic direction of the film is excellent, then how much more one wishes that the script broadened out more. The rapes, the revenge, the batty soliliquies, the discovery, the denouement - these all follow with the logic of one of those cheesy 70's horror compilation films, where plot expansion is sacrificed due to the demands of the portmanteau format. Here Ichii has considerably more space but spends a lot of the running time on showing a succession of repeating, dramatic events. Often thrilling and well mounted in themselves, they restrict matters to a very narrow narrative path, incidentally almost entirely removing Chihiro from any social context. Because of this she loses some sympathy. The truth is that, once the last body appears on screen, the story has nowhere left to go except into the rain. It's been one hell of a ride in the meantime, but Freeze Me ultimately offers nothing more than a train of horrors seen rightly or wrongly as justification in themselves, and which create story cul-de-sac. Ichii of course has to close his show somehow, and sidesteps the issue with what is practically a narrative sleight of hand, leaving the viewer curiously unsatisfied. It is as if the Wild Bunch have killed all the Mexicans, and a stray bullet has got Deke Thornton too.

Interestingly, the HK DVD box shows the heroine apparently frozen, a misleading image to say the least. While perhaps emotionally cold after her traumatising experiences, she never ends up in the cooler herself...

I watched this movie with no knowledge of what the story was about. The director did a very good job developing suspense right from the start. When I found out about the plight of Chihiro, I automatically felt for her. Because of what happened, its effect is so traumatizing that she's virtually helpless to do anything. When push comes to shove, Chihiro has the "fight or flight" choice and it's interesting to see what choice she makes. I must commend Harumi Inoue who gave a really great performance. She truly displayed fear, confusion, paranoia well and I felt really concerned for her character. Hey, if a movie made me feel that strong, I think it got it successfully got its message across.

"Freeze Me" depicts intense violence and I don't mean like cheesy Hollywood does. It deals with violence against women which sadly is not fictional in society. The story takes a trippy twist towards the end and watch the character progression thoughout the film. I must say that Harumi Inoue is stunningly beautiful and was great to watch. She's definitely got a new fan!

While similar in plot to a revenge movie, this is actually a survival movie. I liked it for its intensity: it doesn't take long to get going, and keeps nonstop tension for the next hour or so. Although it reaches its emotional climax a full half-hour before the end, there's enough tension built up by then to carry it through. It concerns a young lady who's confronted by a gang of men who had raped her five years before. The second meeting is no accident, they've sought after her to victimize her some more. Rape is not a crime of sexual gratification, it's a crime of humiliating domination over another person. That said, Chihiro is just the kind of timid soul who can easily be dominated: she doesn't have the courage to do the sensible thing, instead simply hoping the whole thing will go away. It doesn't, of course, and she's forced into action out of self-preservation. It often reminds me of Miike's earlier film, "Audition". That is said to have a strong message about the treatment of women in Japanese society, and I see this as another side of the same coin: a woman who has had a disabling stigma of shame placed on her, and has to struggle to overcome it. While the ensuing violence is certainly justified, it is not glorified. There is no real victory in this movie. While the things she is subjected to are revolting, the camera is thankfully restrained. Most of the violence against her is offscreen, and even the original attack is shown only in fragments, as a series of flashbacks. There is a lot of nudity here, but I don't see it as exploitational. First of all, it's very much a sex-themed movie, so nudity is pretty much a given. Most of it occurs in the shower: she spends an awful lot of time trying to wash herself clean. The movie does offer plenty of messages, but they're not uplifting or inspiring ones at all: more indictments of double standards in the treatment of women. I thought this was a terrific movie, and one that sticks with you, marred only by some truly awful English-language dubbing (at least, in the version I saw). A movie like this depends on a strong lead actress to carry it, and the voice actress in the U.S. version is just really not any good at all.