Freezer Burn (2007) Reviews

• Freezer Burn... Human Popsicle

  juliankennedy232009-06-20

  Freezer Burn: 7 out of 10: A low budget charmer is the best way to describe Freezer Burn. It has some pretty good naturalistic performances as well as some pretty funny writing. It isn’t perfect by any means and some parts, in particular the ending, fall a little flat. It is also a low budget movie, with all the limitations that come with that. If you can look past the lack of polish, there are some very fun and entertaining bits in here. Ella Rae Peck gives a charming, and most importantly believable, performance as the objet d'underage de passion. Her smile brightens up the screen. (Great now I sound like the protagonist). She is however a realistic character and not some fantasy or tragic Hollywood concoction. Michael Consiglio gives the other standout performance as the wheelchair bound lab assistant. He reminds me of Nicholas Brendon (Xander) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He has that great ability to turn a silly throwaway line into something genuinely funny. Overall, I had a fun time. The film has a great tone. Kind of silly but also surprisingly realistic compared to a more polished Hollywood film. I certainly recommended it for both Sci-fi and low budget fans.

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• a rarity in today's cinematic crap-storm...

  sanborneo2009-09-08

  i watched this under a friend's recommendation, & my only problem was, given the title, the obviously low budget, & the fact it involved scientists working in a cheapo lab, i naturally assumed it was going to morph into some sort of sci-fi (that's right, we still spell it that way, SyFy!!) horror film--the Rampage of the Hideous Freezer Demon, or something. but once i got past that, & settled into the film's rhythms, i was pleasantly surprised. i won't bother w/a plot synopsis, but suffice-to-say, it's a very original product, a light but dark anti-romantic comedy. sure, you can laugh that the petri dishes they use in their "lab" are in fact tin-foil take-out containers, but as a veteran of many even LOWER budget productions than this, i can tell you that the level of direction, writing, acting & the consistency of tone they achieve is extremely difficult under those circumstances, & all the more impressive for it. keep your mind open, look past the obvious short-comings, & you'll have a good time most Hollywood dreck can't provide...

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• not what I expected but not bad either

  Rob-O-Cop2009-06-09

  It's hard to say exactly what I expected from this movie going into it. It has the appearance of a turkey in the way it's executed but none the less I personally was relatively entertained and I have nothing to do with the production team. I could see how some people watching this could, if it caught them on the wrong day, hate this movie. It's a pretty unusual plot to start with, although I think the plot outline is somewhat misleading on the sensational "sidesteps the issue of age by freezing himself till its not an issue" thing. Yes that does happen but this movie is really about an inventor who is mildly a 'dweeb' who is in a relationship that is imbalanced against him and has a lab partner who is unreliable and a bad luck magnet. He invents successful cryogenics but because of everything else in his life the invention comes only in time to spare him the pain of his present existence, so he freezes himself on the off chance that he can rely on his unreliable side kick and that in the future things will go how he wants them to, but of course that's not the case. The laughs are understated, that's for sure, but I found the events not obvious and better for that. it doesn't go well for him, and if anything it's a little too realistic on the actual problems our protagonists plans might hit. Hollywood would gloss over these in order to give us a whiz bang story of sci fi adventure, where as this movie investigates all the bits Hollywood would ignore, and I found it interesting for that. Yes it is budget cinema, that's plainly obvious from the get go, and the delivery has a light comedy feel where perhaps it would have been better with something a little darker. The sets are rough and although the acting is not crap no actor manages to pull off a stunner, they all have good moments, but then they all have some bad ones too. Nothing a multimillion dollar budget couldn't fix I'm sure. a lot hinges on Robert Harriell's performance and that's perhaps where this movie trips in that he's not a particularly likable or dis-likable character. Maybe that's the delicate middle ground they wanted to take with this movie, but it would have appealed to more people if they'd made more of a decision on dark or light. Special mention to Michael Consiglio for his shifty unreliable side kick part. There were some funny throw away lines delivered well from him, he was charmingly a jerk and funny for it. In summary I didn't hate this movie. It's definitely not an indie award winner but it's not without merit either only if you manage to be in the right mood to overlook the productions flaws. Given that it's the first movie for the director and writer the next one could well be better as they all learn the craft. I give it 6.5 for an interesting concept and addressing non obvious plot points.

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• what was this i just saw?

  therefdotcom2009-05-30

  i watched this movie yesterday because i saw that it had a rating of over 8 points here on IMDb and because it was categorized as comedy/romance/sci fi. both factors combined is usually a mixture that can not fail my taste. my mistake though was that i did not notice that only 34 people rated it so far, but i just noticed that today before i started writing this review. OK, let's sedate this without revealing too much. to my surprise this started off as a low-cost movie in a rather amateurish lab environment. the acting did not start off as bad as i expected, but the main protagonists felt somewhat hateable from the very beginning. anyway, i didn't want to fall into judgement too soon and watched it through the end before making my mind up. the story of a guy who finds the formula for successful cryogenics in a lab that has like $65 dollars of equipment in it, who gets oppressed by his tyrannic wife, riduculed by his wheelchaired and completely soul-less assistant, and falls in love with a 14 year old girl he barely knows and thereby decides to freeze himself in a fridge until she's his age, can only described as "odd". there are some alight ideas in there, which could have worked as an alright movie if done with a much better script. the final product does not really qualify as a comedy and even less as a scifi/romantic comedy. there is really nothing funny about it. also there is nothing in it that would even remotely pass as romantic. the characters are just sad, very sad. every single one of them and the whole plot line is just tragic. you don't manage to get any feelings for the characters, neither good or bad. it is more like observing the movie than feeling some kind of connection to the protagonist. since the storyline is so out-of-this world they should have used this material and make 90% of all scenes completely over-the-top to give it the needed comedic spin, that this movie is so clearly missing. this wasn't a terribly agonizing experience, since it didn't offend me in any way, but it was extremely boring and very misleading. i was expecting to get some good laughs out of it, or at least some chuckles, but as already stated, this is not a comedy.

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• The title says it all

  charlytully2011-03-17

  If a person were in northern Japan now, cold and starving after the tsunami, and they could get their hands on some warm hamburger or pork loin, they'd probably wolf it down--even if it had FREEZER BURN. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man gets to write the movie reviews; in the realm of very low-budget, low-actors-on-the-totem pole, backyard special effects science fiction films, FREEZER BURN is slightly better than some. In this movie, acting performances fluctuate between understated and WAY over the top, even by the same cast member. While there may be a couple almost memorable lines of dialog (the best one involves wife Blake saying "whittle" and husband Virgil hearing "wittle" early on), most of it is quite lame. So this spin on ENCINO MAN or SLEEPER comes off as a pale, if mildly diverting, imitation.

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