Film Review – Freezer Burn

July 29th, 2010 | POSTED BY Michael Sorce

Freezer Burn directed by Charles Hood sounds like a good movie.  A scientist falls for a younger girl and he decides to freeze himself so that he can wake up and be with her in the future.  This was an interesting enough synopsis for me to place this in my Netflix Instant Queue.  I would come to immediately regret this decision. 

This movie is beyond indie; it walks the delicate line between an indie film and guerrilla-style shooting.  In general, this is not something that I mind; I welcome indie films wholeheartedly.  However, adding this camerawork to terrible acting and an inane script made this movie unbearable to watch.

It opens on Virgil and Rex, two scientists working on a way to preserve things in ice so that they might wake up later fully functional and just as they were before.  After many unimportant plot points and absurd dialogue, Virgil eventually meets a 14-year-old student of his wife’s and immediately falls into pedophilic love with her.  He decides erratically that he will test his new scientific theories by freezing himself in order to wait for her to be the same age as he is.  As you might have guessed, this plays out as the stupidest romantic ploy in the history of film.  Once Virgil is awoken in the future, this movie really takes a turn for the worst.  Nonetheless, I will not ruin the end for you as you may want to torture yourself by watching this later.

I was slightly reminded of another cinematic pedophile, Lester Burnham from American Beauty.  Kevin Spacey played that role beautifully, to where you were almost rooting for this poor man to hook up with the high school girl.  It was to the point that you hardly even noticed it was a pedophilic crush.  This was certainly not the case with Virgil.  Throughout the whole film, all you can think about is how creepy and disturbing his immediate love for this ninth grader is.  As well, Virgil took it much further than Lester did by freezing himself and forfeiting fifteen years of his life to attempt to be with (legally) a girl he has only met twice.

There was literally nothing redeeming about this film.  The acting was awful; the script was full of plot twists that made no sense and sad attempts at quippy dialogue; and the camerawork was just appalling, appearing to not have any control over lighting whatsoever.  I have sat here and endeavored to think of anything positive I could say about the film; all I could come up with is that I am thankful no one in this movie has yet to do another project.  Another encouraging note is that this movie gave me hope.  If these people can make a horrible movie as such and get it onto DVD and even to Netflix, then maybe I, too, can one day shoot a movie worthy of Netflix. 

If you are an indie filmmaker yourself, then you may be able to watch this and identify with someone’s first try at film.  Or you may, like me, watch it and become mortified that this script was able to get any recognition, let alone money to endorse turning it into a movie. 

1 out of 5 stars

American Beauty, Charles Hood, Freezer Burn, Kevin Spacey