Salutations, ski bunnies and ski bucks! Well, Australia doesn’t have much in the way of skiing attractions. Asides from the occasional exception like Mount Kosciusko, if you want ski resorts that come with extras like snow and an actual vertical surface to ski down then you’d be best advised to move next door to New Zealand. This might not be as much of a bad thing as it first appears, since according to this month’s chilling little chiller, the traditional broken leg on the ski slopes is getting off easy. Apparently skiers in Norway have to contend not only with broken limbs and embarrassing skinny-dipping related frostbite injuries, but also hulking great homicidal maniacs appearing out of nowhere and hacking into them like Edward Scissorhands making an ice-sculpture. So grab the snow shoes, some winter jim-jams and a double-barrel shotgun and brace yourself for as many atrocious cold-weather related puns as my editor can take before she gets snow madness as we admire the Northern Frights (that’s one!) with COLD PREY (Friday July 9, SBS2- 11:35PM)
COLD PREY (aka FRITT VILT –’Open Season’) directed by the awesomely-named Roar Uthaug, plays very much like a snowbound FRIDAY THE 13TH movie, in that it features the traditional ‘randy teen campers in remote forest cabin stalked by unstoppable masked maniac’ format popularised by F13th’s unkillable maniac and his bevy of unkillable sequels . Basically, we’re stalking in a winter-wonderland (that’s two!).
A gang of friends hit the slopes for some skiing and snowboarding (the scenery in this section is beautiful, and I was gobsmacked to find out that it was actually cobbled together via a CGI scan of a whole bunch of different mountains) during which we find out that the virginal Ingunn (Viktoria Winge) hasn’t had a toboggan down her luge yet, Eirik (Tomas Alf Larsen) wants Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso-Berdal) to move in with him but Jannicke is having none of it, and Mikal (Andre Midstigen)…well actually Mikal doesn’t have any emotional baggage so he just stands around looking gorgeous- and to be fair, does a good job. Shortly thereafter, Morten Tobias (Rolf Kristian Larsen) cements his status as the film’s comedy relief by breaking his leg in six places during a hilariously near-fatal skiing accident, at which point the quintet must find shelter for the night in an abandoned ski lodge- which you can probably guess is about as currently ‘abandoned’ as the Gulf of Mexico is currently ‘Oil-Free’.
From there, it’s ‘pair off, pants off and perish’ time as the friends decide that being snowbound in a decades-abandoned snow-lodge with a friend who will die if he doesn’t get medical help in 24 hours is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Ingunn and Mikal find a room in which to make the snow-beast with two backs, and when Ingunn spurns Mikal’s advances and he is forced to skulk back downstairs, all unsatisfied and Justin Timberlake-esque, the killer- now seven and a half feet tall and covered head to foot in snow goggles, elk and wolf skins- pops up and subverts the usual slasher film message of ‘sluts die first, the virgin is the heroine’ by introducing Ingunn to his foot-long ice-axe. Unfortunately for Ingunn, that’s not a euphemism- she gets Swiss-ke-bobbed (yes, I know they’re Norwegian, but that doesn’t fit the pun).
This is where the film really kicks into high gear and high-fun. The remaining teen-sicles soon realise that they’re gradually being iced (three!), and just when it looks like Eirik and/or Mikal will save the day, the killer whittles down their number again (amazingly enough, Morten Tobias- our wounded comic relief- is still standing- metaphorically- at this point) and it’s up to Jannicke to become the heroine. Jannicke turning out to be the film’s ass-kicker will not come as a surprise to lesbian viewers, as she kind of looks like the love child of Sigourney Weaver and Xena, Warrior Princess. Jannicke now has to fight to find the dwindling gang a way off the mountain, treat Comic Relief’s increasingly gangrenous leg, solve the mystery of the killer’s identity that the audience already worked out in the opening five minutes, and stop herself from becoming the next victim of the Abominable Foe-Man.
This is a tense, fun and very, very cold little horror roller-coaster that is a blast to ride even though it doesn’t really lay down any new snowfall on the familiar terr(or)ain.
Scary bogeymen, pretty young men and women, subtle homoeroticism and a frozen setting that will have you burying yourself ever deeper in your Snuggie- this is one film that will chill you in more ways than one- and that’s snow joke!
Gavin Pitts
