Friday, August 28, 2009

MOVIE REVIEW: Cold Prey

This is the first movie with subtitles I've ever seen. Usually I avoid movies with subtitles, but my mom picked this out to rent and I didn't realize it had them. Having to read subtitles wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but I really had to pay attention. I turned my computer off because I didn't want to miss anything. But Cold Prey was worth having to read subtitles.

When five young adults go snowboarding on a remote mountain, a member of the group breaks his leg, prompting them to seek refuge in an abandoned cabin. But they don't know that there's a killer lurking in the mountains.

One of the blurbs on the back of the DVD claimed that Cold Prey is one of the most original slasher movies in years. I don't know what that person was thinking. It follows every single slasher movie rule, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Except for the fact that you can tell which order the friends will die in immediately, which kind of sucks.

The part of Cold Prey which sets it apart from other slashers is the characters. They're not stereotypes, they're actually realistic. I cared about them all and didn't want any of them to die (except for the jerk who freaked out when his new girlfriend wouldn't put out and wanted to leave the friend with the broken leg to die). And they're smarter than the average slasher characters. When they couldn't find anything to stitch their friend's leg together, they used superglue. A bit strange, but it worked.

There wasn't a lot of gore, but the film didn't need it because it was very suspenseful. My eyes were glued to the screen to see how they would outsmart the killer.

Although Cold Prey was predictable, it was still a fun slasher. A sequel was released last year, picking up where the first film left off.

Rating: 4/5

2 comments:

venoms5 said...

I tried to get into this one, but just couldn't. It was okay, but not sure I'd watch it again any time soon. It did have some nice suspense scenes as you pointed out.

I much prefer a movie in its original language as opposed to a dub, but the release we got had both subs and a (pretty bad) English dub. The locations were nice and isolated as they should be.

Melissa Helwig said...

Yeah, after I watched this movie I realized that subtitles are much better than having it dubbed.