Solid As Ice: Cold Prey (2006)

Greetings readers, it is time once again for Stacie Ponder's Final Girl Film Club, a collective movie-watching experience wherein her devotees from across Blogland share their impressions of a film chosen by Ms. Ponder herself. This time around she's picked an icy Norwegian horror flick called Cold Prey (2006).

For a previous Film Club outing, Ms. Ponder had her readers and minions watch Frozen (2010), and this was during February. Brrr. I hate the cold, and watching then an icy movie indoors just reminded me of how freaking frigid it was outdoors. But now, when Stacie's sending us to the land of the ice and snow, she's doing so in the summertime, which makes said ice and snow more palatable, as they are naught but distant memories during this delightfully sweltering mid-July.

Thank you, kittens; we have now over-established the whole

ice-and-snow thing.

Beware: spoilers below.

From the opening flashback sequence, Cold Prey lays out all of its cards on the table, face-up and easily readable. The movie is gorgeously photographed, the young actors are beautiful and entertaining, and the story is a solid step-by-step recounting of a standard "locked-in-a-remote-cabin-with-an-injured-friend" story.

A snowboarding accident, on a mountainous backslope away from more populated ski resorts, results in a busted leg for one young man, a member of a group of adventurous youths out for a snowy good time. Fortunately, there's a hotel nearby. Even though the place has been closed for 30 years, there's enough petrol to run the generator, there's some intact cassettes to play in the stereo (which is pretty astonishing; none of my cassettes survived past the early 1990s), there's enough wood for the fireplace, there's enough booze left behind on the sideboard, and there's enough non-moldy tinned food in the pantry to make for a pleasant enough night. (At one point, however, a character is served a meal of fresh oranges; I'll be kind and assume one of the adventurous youths had a backpack stuffed full of fruit.) Then, in the morning, it's off to get help, down off the mountain we go, tra-la, easy-peasy, and all that.

Nope. There's a killer. And like I mentioned up above, we know pretty much from minute one who that killer is. There's no twist endings here. The final survivor is pretty easy to figure out as well.

Oh fuck, he sees us

Cold Prey is a good, not great, movie. It is a solid, serviceable slice of cinematic entertainment. I liked it. I enjoyed the performances of all of the actors, even though it was difficult to get engaged in their character-building, background-revealing, heart-to-heart conversation scenes because, after all, most of them are gonna die. Cold Prey is that kind of movie: I didn't get immersed in it; I was all too aware all along that I was watching a horror movie that was going to follow the playbook point by point. And so it did; I was entertained but not surprised.

For example: no signal on the cell phones?  Check.

The girl in her underwear is the first to die? Check. (Although this was a harrowing and well done scene.)

There are are number of harrowing scenes throughout the movie, wherein one or more of the adventurous youths are trapped in a small room with the killer banging on the door or the wall. Cold Prey does a very good job of building suspense and dread in certain sections.

I will say that the characters in Cold Prey are a cut above your usual dimwitted horror-movie youths. The Cold Prey kids act reasonably and intelligently. They have survival skills and medical skills and you have no problem believing that they'd get down off the mountain all right, if not for that damned killer. When the characters realize there's a murderous madman on the loose, they don't go blundering around; they hide and they stay hid as long as they can. I liked these kids (except for the fatalistic one who channels Bill Paxton's "game over, man" character from Aliens (1986)).

From the Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment, I give Cold Prey a "Hell, yeah" rating. It won't surprise you, you'll see the end coming from the beginning, but it is well-acted, well-filmed, and it will entertain you. For this posting, I rented the DVD, but if I ever saw a cheap copy in a bargain bin, I'd bring it home with me to add to the permanent collection.

Be sure to stick around for the end credits, over which plays an excellent Turbonegro song.

And what the hell is up with the fruitcake credit?

Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading. On July 19, be sure to visit Final Girl to discover what other film-clubbers have to say about Cold Prey.