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| Images courtesy of Cleopatra Entertainment |
Heavy metal vocalist turned exploitation horror director
Brandon Slagle has been at it since the early 2000s, starting out with homegrown
fare such as The Dark Avengers and House of Mansion. After COVID-19 shuttered production on his
films for a few years, the director returned with an explosive turnout of films
including but not limited to Breakout and The Flood. Among his latest efforts is the Cleopatra
Entertainment released freezing cold survival thriller Frost, a microbudget
scenic thriller that turns into a chamber piece of sorts before jumping the
rails completely with an absurdly outlandish shock-and-awe finale. Not since Dominic Murphy’s bizarro “biopic” White
Lightnin’ from 2009 has a film crouched down and made diarrhea all over the
bed in the very last minute.
Pregnant city girl Abby (Devanny Pinn) is on her way to the
remote wintry countryside to visit her estranged alcoholic mountain man father
Grant (The Road Warrior and Commando legend Vernon Wells) with
news of her expecting. After the two
butt heads with the usual back and forth banter about how things would go if mom
were still part of the picture, the two venture out in her swanky new automatic
car. Within minutes of getting on the
road with the old-fashioned Grant hastily managing the wheel at Abby’s behest,
the car loses control and swerves off of the road into the side of a mountain
cliff. Punctured by trees with broken
bones, lacerations and steadily declining temperatures, Grant crawls out with
the intention of going to call for help while Abby bunkers down in the car for
the night, using whatever means she can to keep the vehicle warm while fending
off hungry wild wolves.
A mostly good slow-burning survival endurance thriller ala The
Shallows until it decides it’s not content with being a hard-boiled
actioner and proceeds to defecate all over the screen. I can’t talk about what happens in act three
except to say it’s the stale rotten cotton candy disciples of A Serbian Film
would eat up (no pun intended). Can
an ending negate a film entirely in spite of the care and craftsmanship that
went in preceding it? Usually dark or
bleak endings, however disturbing, are built upon and unleashed within the framework
of the world of the movie, but here it is literally like the director simply
dropped his drawers and began wagging his penis around. It is literally that mercenarily offensive
and abruptly out of nowhere. That’s not
to say shock can’t be used effectively in art but here it is flat out misused.
Aside from the smelly turd coda (you can look it up online
if you must know), everything leading up to it was mostly working. The now crusty but legendary Vernon Wells is
generally good as the aged alcohol soft middle-aged father though most of this
is focused on Devanny Pinn just trying to keep herself and her baby alive. That its reasonably well shot in scope ratio
by Kelton Jones who presents loads of scenic drone photography and offers up a suitably
mournful electronic score by Fernando Perdomo only serves to underline just how
tragic of a misfire this turned out to be.
Effects makeup is pretty good, rendered by Megan Monroe and Oliver Poser,
though again the film goes for a shock so brutally over the top their efforts
feel shortchanged. Co-produced by the
two leading stars, one wonders how both of them felt about the water slide of sewage
middle fingered ending foisted upon a completely unsuspecting viewership.
Brandon Slagle apparently isn’t going away anytime soon, but
for a survival thriller about a pregnant woman trapped in a car perched
alongside a cliff, the way this thing wraps up ensures I won’t be seeking out
more works of his anytime soon. A
halfway decent film that abruptly turns really awful when you least expect it, Frost
like other Slagle efforts is hitting the small screen for a viewership
scrolling through their firestick for the newest low budget digitally rendered
thriller on the lineup. Somewhere in Frost
is a good movie you could recommend until it decided to fasten its edge lord
ankle and wrist cuffs proudly for no apparent reason. Survival horror films set in the winter
nature are always a good bet and not all of them have to end well, but unfortunately
this kinda falls into the camp of, say, Nick Palumbo or Fred Vogel, mean for
the sake of it. The equivalent of a dead baby T-shirt.
--Andrew Kotwicki
