Freeze



Captain Mortimer and the crew of the Innsmouth are on a rescue mission to the North Pole to try to save Mortimer’s friend Captain Streiner and his crew. The voyage they’re on is already perilous enough, but when their ship gets stuck in a particularly nasty bit of ice their situation takes a turn for the worse when murderous fish-looking creatures sneak on board and start decimating the entire crew.



Mortimer, a couple of officers, the ship’s log master, and a female stowaway are the only ones who manage to escape the carnage. But without their ship and most of their supplies, there really isn’t much they can do out in the middle of the arctic. By sheer luck they manage to find a cave where they plan to set up a base. But with nowhere else to go, help potentially years away, and a swarm of monsters still on the loose, their odds of survival are looking pretty grim.



Hey, look! I managed to watch something else kinda new-ish! Hurray for me! Or maybe not so hurray for me, because as it turns out Freeze isn’t all that hot (ha!). In fact, it’s sadly pretty lackluster. But I suppose that’s to be expected, since it appears that the film’s writer/director Charlie Steeds has apparently centered much of his career around making movies either loosely based on other properties or by trying to capitalize on said other property’s success. The Barge People sounds like an unfortunate combination of The Hills Have Eyes and Humanoids of the Deep. Gods of the Deep sounds like it’s trying to cram every underwater ocean horror movie into one. And then of course you’ve got Freeze here, which I suspect is loosely inspired by AMC’s The Terror. In case you’re wondering, no, none of them are considered to be any good, and they all look to be cheap as hell. Which is a shame, because from what I’ve read Steeds seems to have an appreciation for Lovecraft and likes to work that into a lot of the plots. But unfortunately since most of the movies aren’t very good, that just means he’s making more lackluster Lovecraftian films for us Lovecraft fans to have to wade through.


“But still, we soldier on…”

I usually try to be pretty nice with my movie write-ups, but sadly Freeze kinda fails on nearly every level. You want suspense in your horror movie? Well, too bad. There isn’t any here. You get less than a minute and a half in, and already the movie has shown you the monsters. And not just little parts of them here and there, like a hand or a flash of creepy fish eye. Nope, you see the FULL monster. And all its friends. And again, we’re not even two minutes in (including some opening credits) and the movie has already done all of this. Then just another minute or so later it shows us a creepy book with illustrations of the monsters accompanied by cryptic, flowing writing, and suddenly we know that this isn’t just a monster movie, but also a Lovecraft inspired one too. So ANY mystery or tension the film could have worked with has flown right out the window and we’re only…*checks*…. 2 minutes and 43 seconds into the film. Stellar work, guys.



Then there’s the characters and the dialogue. Now, a couple of the characters I can put up with for the most part. The writer dude? He gets taken out pretty early and used as a plot device later, but he’s fine. And the stowaway seems to be the only consistent character who knows what the hell she’s doing, so she’s good too. But most everyone else is horribly corny. You’ve got your coward who can’t seem to make up his mind, and the expected selfish jackass archetype is wandering around too, of course. And when they finally find Streiner you also get your standard looney, Lovecraftian, “I’m gonna unleash a horrible evil upon the world just because I can! Mwahahaha!” nutjob. Meaning so far the film is batting 1000, and your cheesy horror Bingo card should be filling out quite nicely.



And of course because the film is so poorly written, their motivations ping-pong all over the place. The coward, in particular, is just obnoxiously self-contradictory. When one of them gets hurt his first response is to simply let the dude die, so that they can save more supplies for themselves. But when Streiner kills that same wounded man a little while later, suddenly he’s shocked and all “how could you?” Like, what the hell? Did you think leaving him out in the snow was more humane than a bullet to the head? For the love of the Dark Ones, make up your mind!



But then again, this is the same guy who was all “We have to follow our Captain’s orders no matter what!” at the beginning of the film, and then turned around and released Streiner after his beloved Captain went to the trouble of tying him up. Which I could have perhaps forgiven, since he hadn’t yet been told that Streiner had lost his marbles by that point. But 1) he never once questioned why the guy was tied to a rock in the first place, and 2) he looked at this dude spouting absolute gibberish and sporting a giant bloodstain down his chin and apparently thought, “yeah, sure, this guy is totally trustworthy.” So not only is he confusing, but he’s apparently painfully stupid too.



And that type of behavior isn’t just relegated to that one guy. Even some of the ‘likeable’ characters can’t seem to make up their damn minds about what they want to do. Captain Mortimer goes from “I must save my friend” to “I must kill my friend” in the blink of an eye. Which, in his defense, is clearly the right call, cause the guy is loopy as hell. But it takes him until almost the end of the movie to become truly invested in this decision. Because even well after he’s made this choice, he keeps letting this schmuck live. Has an easy opportunity to shoot him early on: doesn’t. Had another opportunity to kill him after a fight where he gets his fingers bitten off: doesn’t. Has plenty of time to kill him at his leisure after having him tied up, but instead lets him babble on about the fish-men AND threaten to rape a woman and – you guessed it! – HE STILL DOESN’T KILL HIM. One wonders what the hell he was waiting for, since he sounded so determined to kill him. An invitation, perhaps? Maybe he wanted to give his old friend an opportunity to escape so he’d have more of a sporting chance at killing him? I don’t know, because no explanation makes sense.

Of course, we the viewer all know that it was done just so that the movie could have an excuse for an explosive face-off at the end. But it gets rather tiresome listening to Mortimer talk about killing Steiner for the good of the world because he wants to unleash these creatures upon it, and then not only NOT telling the rest of his group about this threat, but then also becoming obsessed with the idea of blowing up their own ship to keep the threat from escaping instead of, you know, killing the actual threat. IE, the only other guy who knew how to operate the boat, because the fish people can’t leave the arctic without it. I don’t know. It’s just weird reasonings all around, man.



So pretty early on the characters and plot are already easily identifiable as quite questionable. But the thing that really…I don’t know, irked me the most about the film, I guess, was the multitude of other inconsistencies it had. And I’ve never felt like one of those people that like to pick out every little thing that’s wrong with a period piece. Like, I’m not one of those car guys who’ll go “This movie is set in the spring of ‘72, but that car wasn’t released until the winter of ‘72! Boo! Unauthentic!” Because honestly, for the most part, I don’t care. As long as most everything looks ‘close enough’ I probably won’t even notice. But this movie had enough of those instances where even I noticed that things were horribly wrong.



For instance, since we’re never given a specific date that the film takes place in, I’m not sure what type of guns they’re using (I highly suspect the film wasn’t all that aware either). But regardless of whether or not they’re using muskets or breechloaders (though I’m pretty sure it’s muskets since one of them asks for powder at some point), even I  know that these types of guns should not be firing multiple shots in succession before having to go through the process of reloading. Yes, some of the rifles are double barreled. That means you get two. TWO. And sometimes they only shot two, but other times they snuck in three, and I think once they even got off four without reloading, and that’s the type of stuff that seriously bothers me. Especially when it becomes clear that the only time these guns seem to run out of bullets is when it becomes convenient for the movie for them to do so.


Whelp, I miraculously got three shots out of this thing. But I guess the Dark Ones won’t grant me four. Bummer.

Then of course you have other things too. Like a gramophone suddenly playing a jazz song, or even the simple fact that the movie has all these people walking around in the arctic, in below freezing temperatures and none of them have their flippin’ coats buttoned. Then again, the snow does seem to be a miracle worker. At one point Captain Mortimer loses his fingers, runs outside into the snow where he miraculously gains them back, only to go back into the cave and lose them again. So perhaps their constant worry freezing to death was unfounded. Or maybe they’re hoping their stupidity will keep them insulated, since the one survivor just casually strolls out of the cave after everyone is dead and heads off into the snow, as if they have somewhere to go and are completely unconcerned about freezing to death. Who knows. It’s a mystery.


Or maybe she just didn’t give a shit, since she basically strapped two guns together and Rambo’d her way through all the fish people towards the end…come to think of it, she was actually the most competent character in the film. Go, Rambo Lady, go!



So, uh, yeah. I could go into detail about the crappy fish-dude costumes and how they all look like they were bought in bulk on clearance at Spirit Halloween, but I feel like I’ve complained enough about Freeze. The one point I’ll give it in its favor is that they did film some of the scenes in actual snow, so some of the outside shots are actually very pretty. So that’s nice. Oh (!), and they had a decent camera and lighting, so you can clearly see everything (not that that’s always a good thing…), including all their practical effects. So I suppose not being plunged into perpetual darkness is nice, too. But honestly, unless you’re a die-hard Lovecraftian fan who has to watch every movie about or inspired by Lovecraft’s stories, you can skip this. It’s not horrible, but it’s just not that good. And it’s just bad enough that you’ll probably end up annoyed about something by the end of it. I know I was.

Freeze is available on a variety of streaming services.

Freeze is also available on DVD.

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