Frozen

Three college kids on a skiing trip talk a chairlift operator into breaking the rules so they can take one last trip down the mountain before going home. Through a series of wacky communications failures, they end up stranded on the chairlift. In the freezing cold. For at least five days unless they do something to save themselves. Oh, but they're stranded ridiculously high in the air and there are wolves.
Frozen was written and directed by Adam Green, the man who brought us Hatchet, and Kane Hodder's in it for about two minutes. Somehow those two minor, barely visible factors confused and fooled everybody, who then went on to talk about Frozen as an amazing horror movie.
This isn't horror. It's a drama. It's an upsetting drama about a horrific situation, but horror implies, you know, scary. I wasn't scared. I was too busy crying.
And, based on what I've heard about 127 Hours, it's pretty much the same movie, except it's about one guy trapped under a rock instead of three people trapped in freezing air. But if 127 Hours is a drama (and it is), then so is Frozen and everybody who said it's a horror movie owes me a quarter.
Frozen is one of those movies that I can't criticize. It's a well made, tense and moving movie. There's nothing wrong with it at all. But that didn't stop me from hating it. I want to be entertained by movies; I don't watch movies so I can spend an hour and a half crying and occasionally shouting at the screen "Why won't you end?!"
Hell, I might even recommend Frozen to people I know who think movies are meant to be depressing (Scott would probably like it) and I really want to give it a good review. It is an amazing movie. It's just an amazing movie that I hated.
And, I cannot stress this enough, it's a drama, not a horror film. There is some gore in it, but it's the realistic sort of gore that I can't stand to watch. For instance, one character decides to jump for it but forgets that the best thing to do when falling from a great height is to not keep your legs as straight and stiff as possible. I watched the next several minutes of the movie through my fingers in an attempt to shield myself from having to see the aftermath of the landing.
This from the girl who can watch and enjoy Hatchet without so much as a wince. It's all about context and tone.
The hardest part to watch, though, had nothing to do with gore or frostbite or any of the physical effects of the characters' plight. No, the part where I lost it completely (and couldn't hear a good portion of the next scene, thanks to all the sobbing I was doing) is when the token girl remembers her dog at home and starts talking about how "she's not going to understand that I died," and how the dog's going to think she was just abandoned. That scene made my soul hurt.
Adam Green's a hell of a writer.
If I ever meet him, I'm going to shake his hand, tell him he's fantastic and then kick him in the knee for subjecting me to this.

End of line.
-Sally