Man vs the Review: Cold Prey (2006)

(This is part of the Final Girl Film Club series of reviews.  Thanks to Stacie Ponder for the selection.)

The malfunctioning air conditioner, the hastily-patched-up hole in the living room window and the Texas-in-July heat have all combined to make this a hotter-than-usual Sunday evening, so what better way is there to beat the heat than to spend a couple hours in an abandoned hotel somewhere in Norway?  Oh, sure, there's a crazed killer around, but that just adds to the charm!

First things first, I watched the dubbed version of it, since that was what was on Netflix Instant when I watched it.  I know there's a lot of virulently anti-dub folks out there, but I didn't mind too much because the dub was, in my opinion, pretty well-done (and after an adolescence spent watching Godzilla movies and localized anime on TV, I can take it.)

The first act of Cold Prey (Fritt Vilt in its native Norwegian) has us meeting our main characters: main couple Jannicke and Eirik, PDA couple Mikal and Ingunn, and quippy friend Morten.  One thing that caught me by pleasant surprise was that all the characters were actually likeable, unlike the usual slasher fare of characters who are just there to add to the bodycount.  And, yes, this is a slasher, but in the slow-burn, Carpenter's Halloween kind of way.  Instead of just establishing future victims, the film takes the time to get to know our characters before killing them off.

Our protagonists are out snowboarding on a particularly remote mountainside (where people have been going missing for decades, I might add), when Morten breaks his leg in an accident.  Inconveniently out of cell phone range (of course) and in need of medical attention, they find a run-down ski lodge where they decide to take shelter for the night.  This leads to a great shot where Eirik breaks an upstairs window and the camera pulls back ever-so-slowly to reveal more of the shadowy interior.

Here, the film trades the gorgeous snowy scenery for the cramped quarters of the ski lodge.  Once inside, resourceful Jannicke sets to work patching up Morten's leg with ski lodge booze and a discarded tube of super-glue.  Soon, the others get the power switched on again (complete with cheesy diegetic music, Dawn of the Dead style).  Mikal and Ingunn decide to sneak off for a little alone time, but when Ingunn realizes that being stranded in a creepy abandoned ski lodge is something of a mood-killer, it leads to an argument, and Mikal walking out in a huff.  Unfortunately for Ingunn, a mysterious someone picks that moment to strike.  With a pick-axe.  This is one of the film's few bloody scenes, but it's effective for that reason.  Eirik sets out in the morning to find help, but he doesn't get very far, and it's soon apparent to the remaining survivors that they're not safe alone.  What follows is a cat-and-mouse game as the friends try to stay one step ahead of the killer.

The killer here is credited simply as "Fjellmannen", or "Mountain Man".  They do give him a bit of back-story at the end (and Fritt Vilt 3 expands on it) but in this film, there's really no reason for it (not unlike The Shape, who also isn't given much motivation for killing other than "evil").  It turns out the Fjellmannen has been using the hotel as his base of operations since the '70s, killing travelers and collecting their shoes, jewelry, clothes, and other stuff (was that a Lillehammer '94 Olympics cap I saw?).  And he's got a great look, too, dressed like a ragged mountain man with a utilitarian cloth mask that resembles a featureless ghostly face.  This is put to great effect in one of my favorite shots, from the p.o.v of one of the survivors looking out a window.  We see a long shot of the Fjellmannen, contrasted by the snow, then he turns to the camera, noticing the window, and we get a quick, disturbing look at the eye-and-mouth-holes in his mask.  He's also good at the old slasher trick of appearing out of nowhere.  Without giving too much away, there was a chase scene towards the end that I just had to rewind to see again for that very reason.

On the downside, the film does have a couple of incongruous moments, like the random Burger King product placement, or the Dramatic Shotgun Reveal Music.  There's some spots of shaky-cam, too, but it's only noticeable in particularly tense moments.  I also could have done without the "shadow crossing the foreground quickly" scare that happened in a couple of spots.  And then there's Morten's unrequited crush on Jannicke.  Even though I can almost see where he's coming from, and it does lead to some nice Character Bits towards the end, it almost comes as too little, too late, because most of her Character Bits (until she goes all Laurie Strode) were about how she's hung up on Eirik.  But overall, Cold Prey is a tense, well-shot, claustrophobic thriller (chiller?) with a likeable cast that's light on the gore, but still delivers.  Recommended

Man vs Not Calling it a Reboot

Recently, a well-known fictional franchise has undergone a bit of a nip and tuck to scrub off some of the trappings that have been part of it since the beginning.  No, I don't mean the hullabaloo at DC Comics.  I am, of course, referring to the release of Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the latest James Bond novel.  While the film series already had a Continuity Upgrade or several, most notably with the advent of Daniel Craig in the role, the novels kept the character and his circumstances more or less the same, supposedly.  But this is the first time it's happened in the novels, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Now, I don't consider myself a huge fan of the Bond franchise, but I have been known to stop and watch the films if I ever catch them on TV, and I have a few of the Ian Fleming novels, plus Thunderball on DVD. (One of these days I will upgrade my VHS copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as well.)  Admittedly, I haven't read any of the continuations by Martin Gardner or Raymond Benson, but I do have a hardback copy of the one-off Devil May Care, a Cold War-set novel by Sebastian Faulks meant to hearken back to the Fleming stories.  In theory, I'm not opposed to this Temporal Re-adjustment of the novels, but one detail caught my eye.  As of Carte Blanche, Bond was born in 1979.  I am now older than James Bond.

Bad enough I'm older than current Doctor actor Matt Smith.  That's okay; I'm in my early 30s and used to being older than actors now, and he's playing a 900-plus-year-old alien, but James Bond?  Yes, I know it's just a fictional character, but I usually saw him as an older man anyway (the major plot impetus in the aforementioned Thunderball is that Bond has been getting on a bit and ordered to get a bit of R&R at a health spa).  Add to that the fact that Bond (not to mention the whole super-spy genre he helped usher in) was firmly entrenched in the Cold War-era setting (see Sebastian Faulks, above), and it's enough to give a guy a complex.

On the other hand, maybe a younger protagonist is what the series needs.  Comic books, after all, get away with a "sliding timescale" all the time these days (bar the occasional continuity hiccups; witness again the Storyline Reappraisal at DC), but that's supposedly to keep things fresh and attract new readers.  Why try this with the Bond novels when the Fleming stories are still in print?  I would figure a new reader would be likely to start with the Fleming "canon" first, then branch out looking for more.  Personally, I would like to see more done like Devil May Care, but I will wait to reserve my final judgement until I've read the thing.  Which probably won't be until it ends up in the second-hand bookstore, but still...  Maybe I'll just re-read Casino Royale instead.

By the way, my favorite film Bond?  Connery, with Dalton second.  Moore was better as the Saint (but the radio version had Vincent Price, who wins that competition simply by virtue of being Vincent Price.  But there's plenty of time to talk about Vincent Price later...)

Man vs Relative Dimensions in Space

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blue Box)

Let me start by talking a bit about my earliest memories.  I must have had a menagerie of stuffed animals, including Papa Bear, Baby Bear, and Stacey the elephant.  (I think I also wanted to call my new baby sister Stacey, but as I was a young'un of three-and-a-bit years, I was outvoted.)  I also became aware of television.  In particular, two specific images.  One of them sad, and one scary.

I'm pretty sure I saw a news report about John Lennon's death.  It sounds weird now that I put it to words, but I have a vague memory of seeing a news anchor talking with a picture of a man and the word "LENNON" in a banner somewhere.  (A quick search of the YouTube gives me an idea of what I might have seen, but I won't post it here.  I'm not going to dwell.)  I'm pretty sure I didn't understand what it meant.  Maybe I felt sad.  I'd like to think I did.

The other memory I had of television was this: a man gets green slime on his hand that slowly turns him into a monster while he freaks out about his crazy green monster hand.  Yes, my parents got me to watch Doctor Who.  And I haven't been the same since.  Okay, so I didn't really get into watching it until a few years down the line, but those early memories sparked my interest in it.  It was scary, it was fun, but most importantly, it was weird.  Much has been said by others about the idea that American TV was like small-scale movies, while British TV was like large-scale plays.  Maybe that was part of the "weird" aesthetic of Doctor Who and the other occasional British shows I caught glimpses of here and there (see also: Fawlty Towers).  Also, though I couldn't properly express it, I was always baffled by the use of film for exterior shots and videotape for interior shots (a practice that Doctor Who used more-or-less continually until 1986.)

The Dallas PBS station showed it on late Saturday nights, that weird netherspace where they didn't have any official PBS programming and so just threw whatever they could get their hands on at the wall.  They also aired each story in "movie" format, with the occasional bad edit to reveal the serialized nature for those paying attention.  This had the advantage of being like a new sci-fi feature film every week, but combined with the late night time slot, it meant that I would have to stay up until midnight or later to see the story through.  And if it was a six-parter, forget about it.  (There's plenty of Jon Pertwee stories I never saw the end of, and I still don't know how I managed to keep it together during "Talons of Weng-Chiang".)  Oh, but when I got to the end, that "electronic scream" that to most viewers meant "scary cliffhanger" was, to me, one of the best sounds ever.  Even though it was the end of an adventure, what an adventure it was!  And Tom Baker, the guy with the scarf (because in those early days it was always "the guy with the scarf", even when it may have been Jon Pertwee) would show off that big toothy grin, promising even more next week.

I didn't always get to watch it, of course.  Later, when we were older, my sister would want to watch Saturday Night Live.  I did my rebellious older brother duty by calling it "Saturday Night Lame" and getting into arguments about it.  And even before that, there were times when I wasn't as obsessed just plain forgot it was on.  It was after one of these gaps that I stumbled upon it again, or, rather, something that seemed like it. The music style had changed, I didn't recognize any of the cast, and who was this blond fella with the celery in his lapel, and why were they calling him Doctor?  My mind would soon be blown, but more on that another time.

(And to tie it all together and make it relevant to the day of posting, Howard da Silva, who gave recap narrations on the episodic US broadcasts in the '70s also played Benjamin Franklin in the film version of 1776.  Truly, the cosmos works in mysterious ways.)

Man vs the Sophomore Slump

And now it's come to this.  The second post.  Here's where I decide if I want to keep at this crazy experiment in disciplined writing, or if it all comes crashing down.  So far, I'm... pretty confident.  Maybe.  See, I like words, and language, and even the act of writing itself, but one thing I lack is discipline.  I am hoping that through this blog I can work to improve that (and improve my writing style as well.)  Yes, I admit it.  I'm writing for me.  However, that doesn't mean any readers I may have won't find it entertaining.  I can hope, can't I?

I toyed with the idea of making this an "about me" post, since my first post didn't really have much of that, but the basics of it just aren't that interesting.  After all, who wants to read about the day-to-day life of a quality control inspector?  "Did I ever tell you about the time I found three units in a row that did not have batteries?  That was a red letter day, let me tell you!"  No, no, no.  That kind of stuff just isn't suited for this little corner of the idea-space that I'm settling into.  Yes, I realize in my last post I said I would be writing about myself, and I do intend to, but not really in the "journal" sense.  More like "disjointed memoirs."

One particular Thing that Happened set me, at an early age, on the path of the Pop Culture Nerd.  (Or, should I say "anorak" in this case?)  So, be here tomorrow for a special July 4th post about some British TV show!  Oh, wait...

Man vs the Mission Statement

So, I started a blog...

It is a little after midnight on July 3 as I start this. Admittedly, this is a little later than I had intended, but at this point I consider it an accomplishment that I even started it at all.  Of course, the real test will be to see if I can keep this up.  I'm not saying I will post daily, as that will doom me from the start.  I think twice weekly is a good enough goal for now, with the option open for more frequent postings.  (Of course, if I do post daily, so much the better.  Watch this space tomorrow.  Maybe.)

As for the subject matter, well, this is the Internet, where real life and pop culture collide in strange, unforeseen ways.  Sure, I'll post the nerdy stuff, but I may sprinkle in some autobiographical asides from time to time.  (I've got a personal essay about Doctor Who in the works that was part of the driving force behind me starting this blog in the first place.  Look for it somewhere down the line.)

The full, formal title of the blog is "Man vs the Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe," a play on the conflicts taught in lit class, with one of my favorite unwieldy scientific phrases.  Never before has the end of all existence sounded so... trivial.  Seriously, try saying "inevitable heat death of the Universe" keeping a straight face.  The Universe is too vast, and the term "heat death" sounds so small, I think.  Add "inevitable," which is in itself a funny-sounding word, and you've got... well, you've got something anyway.

Clearly, I've started to ramble, even more than I intended.  So, to close out this initial post and distract us all from the unfinished, unprofessional nature of this blog in its early hours, here's some flashy movement and bright colors, courtesy of Polysics.  Enjoy.