Review by Ben Bussey
Another found footage movie.
Will those four words alone not suffice? Do they not immediately tell you everything you need to know? Do I need to mention cameras running at all times when any reasonable person would have turned them off, the bulk of the screen time taken up by unconvincing relationship scenes involving boring two-dimensional characters you couldn’t have cared less about in the first place, and wobbly, erratic camerawork getting even wobblier and more erratic at those rare moments when things threaten to get interesting, thereby denying us even a glimpse of whatever it is that’s supposed to be the big threat, ultimately leaving us utterly cheated in every respect – only to then have the dreaded “cop watching footage days later” ending and proceed to continue in proper film mode for a further ten bloody minutes?
What makes it hurt most of all is that Frost really needn’t have been this way. Scientists on a glacier uncovering something that shouldn’t have been disturbed – yes, obviously it evokes The Thing (as does the other upcoming release, the similarly formulaic but far more entertaining Blood Glacier), but it’s still hardly one of the most frequently utilised horror movie set-ups, and the potential is there to do something genuinely haunting and cinematic. Even more teasingly, there are brief moments when Frost comes close to doing this, when not in found footage mode: we open and close on some nice, atmospheric opening close-ups of the ice, and have some really quite beautiful Shining-esque aerial shots along the way. But nope, for the bulk of it, it’s an uninteresting thirtysomething couple, on the glacier for no readily discernible reason, spending the bulk of their time having boring relationship issues which – again, for no readily discernible reason – they keep the camera on throughout. That said, they do stop short of filming themselves in bed, even though they come close – which, frankly, feels like yet another way this boring bloody film robs us of any real entertainment value, given that we get almost no look at whatever it is that is threatening them.
I know there’s always that ‘power of imagination’ argument to be made, but there’s also the argument that this is just lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy filmmaking at its most boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring.
Sorry, but if they can’t be arsed to make a proper movie, I can’t be arsed to write a proper review.
Frost is out Region 2 DVD on 10th February 2014 from Entertainment One.