Deep Freeze backdrop
Deep Freeze poster

DEEP FREEZE

2002 US HMDB
June 10, 2002

A deadly creature terrorizes a team of researchers at an isolated Antarctic laboratory.

Directors

John Carl Buechler

Cast

Allen Lee Haff, Götz Otto, Alexandra Kamp, Karen Nieci, Howard Holcomb, Rebekah Ryan, David Millbern, David Lenneman, Robert Axelrod, Norman Cole
Horror Azione Fantascienza

REVIEWS (1)

RG

Roberto Giacomelli

Antarctica. In an oil extraction station, strange events begin to occur: mysterious seismic shocks and disappearances of workers. Meanwhile, a group of newly graduated researchers arrive. Soon, the young people will begin to fall victim to some trilobites that had remained hibernated in the ice, awakened by the unorthodox oil extraction techniques carried out by the station's officials. The simple plot gives an idea of the poor quality of the film in question: "Deep Freeze", or how to choose a subject that is not original and not interesting at all and make a poorly made and useless film. First of all, why include in a fanta-horror with killer monsters a threat unknown to most people like the Trilobite? Sure, the intelligent student who suddenly understands what is killing her friends from a small explanation to the laypeople of paleontology, but choosing as the villain a marine crustacean extinct in the Paleozoic does not seem to me the happiest of choices; considering then that the trilobites were made as large cockroaches with inexplicable tentacles (?), not at all frightening and almost never shown, there is another reason to leave this film on the videoclub shelf. Setting aside the absurd choice of the "threat", you cannot identify any reason that could save this direct-to-video product from the trash: the development of the story has originality equal to zero; in fact, for the entire duration of the film, you only follow the uninteresting personal affairs of a group of young men with no psychological characterization, who are attacked one by one by a trilobite. Naturally, there is no presence of any sequence even vaguely close to gore, and with each death, we have to endure a annoying and senseless sequence of flashes that uselessly and quickly replay images already shown in the film. The sense of uselessness is reinforced by the narrative construction that closely resembles the now overused fanta-culture of Scott's "Alien" and a setting stolen from Carpenter's masterpiece "The Thing". Flat direction by John Carl Buechler, already responsible for the seventh episode of the "Friday the 13th" saga and the mediocre monster movie "Ork".