Main cast: Johnny Vivash (Barnabas McCullough), David Lenik (Gideon Roth), Beatrice Barrila (Carmen), Rory Wilton (Captain Roland Mortimer), Ricardo Freitas (Marlowe Spriggs), Jake Watkins (Charles Redgrave), Simon Pengelly (Simmons), Elliot Hadley (Ashcroft), Sam Lane (Ichthyoid), Jaime Seal (Ichthyoid), and Tim Cartwright (Sir William Streiner)
Director: Charlie Steeds

The war ship Innsmouth is ice locked hundreds of miles from the Arctic, oh dear.

This puts a big dampener to the plan of Captain Roland Mortimer to lead his crew into a triumphant rescue of his friend Sir William Streiner and the man’s crew, who were MIA after making what seemed like an ill-fated effort to be the first people to reach the North Pole.

Still, the Innsmouth has enough food for six months, so they can wait for rescue… right?

Well, if the name of the ship isn’t a dead giveaway, the ship is soon invaded by monstrous fish-man things called the ichthyoids that just love the taste of human flesh.

The party gets too much for a few people that end up fleeing for their lives: Mortimer, the useless and cowardly first mate Gideon Roth, the reluctant Barnabas McCullough that has been warning Mortimer against putting them in this situation in the first place, the resident abrasive asshole Marlowe Spriggs, the artist Charles Redgrave that has a badly mangled leg thanks to a gnaw-happy ichthyoid, and the stowaway Carmen that naturally has to be the better shot than these icky white men and may as well as ‘Final Girl’ stamped on her forehead.

Carmen’s bright idea is to sneak onboard so that she can locate a family member that was part of Streiner’s lost crew. I’m not sure what she intends to do in order to locate that person, but then again, these characters aside from Barnabas have a remarkable ability to come up with the worst decision ever for any bad situation.

Now, one good thing about Freeze is that it is on the whole an alright if unremarkable monster movie. It won’t break new grounds, as the characters on the whole are familiar horror film archetypes and the tropes are out on full force, but it’s well put together to give some thrills and some gore now and then. Since Charlie Steeds did the screenplay, directed this one, produced it, and even did the camera work, I suppose full credit goes to him.

The monsters look like guys in suits repurposed from Mr Steeds’s other movie The Barge People, but still, the practical effects are alright and the CGI, which can look cheap and fake, is fortunately kept to a minimum.

Unfortunately, this movie needs a bigger budget to work. I know, I know, it’s not kosher to insist that every movie needs to cost hundreds of millions, but the problem here is that there is supposed to be an army of ichthyoids waiting to be unleashed onto the world and destroy humanity, and I can only see… let’s me count again… at most a dozen of these guys in rubber suits in a single “oh, here they are in full force” scene. That’s like a hot guy taking off his pants at the end of an exciting date only for me to squint and say, “Wait… where is it?”

Also, there are way too many characters here, and most of them just end up hogging space and eating up screen time that could have been used to better flesh out the more important characters.

Gideon and Spriggs could be merged into a single character, as having the two of them here is just overkill. Carmen could also be taken out from the whole thing and have Barnabas take over in her scenes—there will be little change to the resulting movie. The likely reason Carmen is here is that the people behind this movie felt that a female is needed among the cast of characters, as on the whole she has no role to play in the overarching plot. It’s the same with Charles, as his character ends up being an utter waste of space and has zero role, not even as a placeholder or narrator.

Oh, and best don’t expect good Lovecraft-ian stuff here. The movie tosses in various cosmic horror tropes but oddly enough, not those associated with frozen wastelands. Why set a story about Deep Ones in the Arctic, of all places, especially when this movie sees the characters wandering into mountain passages and there are no mountains in that region? Why ichthyoids and not shoggoths?

I get the impression that Mr Steeds only have a superficial familiarity with that particular horror genre.

Anyway, despite the more questionable choices made by the people behind this thing, it’s an alright monster flick. Just don’t expect anything innovative or groundbreaking, and no one will go home feeling too disappointed.

The post Freeze (2022) first appeared on HOT SAUCE REVIEWS.