Frostbitten
Vampires terrorize a city in Norrbotten, Sweden.
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- Cast:
- Petra Nielsen , Grete Havnesköld , Nour El Refai , Måns Nathanaelson
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Reviews
The Worst Film Ever
Lack of good storyline.
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
After Let the Right One In, I was wary about approaching another Swedish vampire film. Surely it couldn't live up to the brilliance of that master piece. Well, it doesn't. But Frostbiten is a different kind of beast altogether. Frostbiten is a wonderful return to classical vampires. They hate garlic, don't have reflections etc. This lends itself well to the comic tone of the film. Even in a foreign language, this is instantly quotable and memorable. From lines such as "Stop throwing garden gnomes at me!" and a girl making an X rather than a crucifix, we have a film that doesn't take itself seriously, but isn't stupid either. The film does well to split up the adult world and the teen world. The teen world is basically filled with drugs and parties, lending itself as the perfect set-up for a massacre. Meanwhile, the adult world is filled with the backstory and the main plot thrust.The score and soundtrack work in perfect harmony. The film opens during the war, and the score has an eerie Gothic sound which seems as though is should be coming straight from a gramophone. The effects are perfect in my opinion. The mix of CG and make-up is almost indistinguishable. It comes across as an old classical stop-motion piece at times. The whole film was enjoyable in the same way as The Lost Boys. Fun, exciting and hilarious. Only, Frostbiten has talking dogs.
This movie starts with a flashback. A flashback were they talk German, but evidently you can hear (if you're familiar with the German language), that the actors are not Germans themselves. Just a trivia fact, for the beginning.Because this doesn't hurt the movie, after the flashback you get to the present time and the movie kicks off. And that means it really get's going! It then starts out more as (teen-)comedy, just to evolve into a horror-comedy. The transition is pretty good and many jokes work, but unfortunately in the end (literally), the movie falls short. It just seems, that they run out of ideas or money ... or both, but this movie does not feel like it's finished. It's a shame then, because this could've been so much better, but it's still good!
A vampire tale set in Northern Sweden, the plot of Frostbite can be summed up fairly quick: a researcher has concocted a serum that turns people into vampires, and a bunch of people drink it.I didn't think it was supposed to be particularly funny, or scary, or anything other that what it is: a lighthearted vampire movie that's enjoyable to watch. If you don't have other expectations the film is decent and watchable, the acting is good, the production is good. Sure, the plot is predictable but it's a vampire movie! How unpredictable does the genre get? I wasn't looking for originality or innovation here, just a good movie to watch, and this was.When Lukas Moodysson directs a Swedish vampire movie, then you can expect some originality, some twists and turns, some things that you wouldn't think could ever be in that type of movie. Until then, pass the popcorn and enjoy Frostbiten for what it is.There's a lot of blood and gore, but it isn't shocking, just the usual vampire bites. No nudity to speak of, but hey, you can't have everything. There is some drug usage, but it's a plot device, not gratuitous. Fairly tame for a horror movie, really.
When a movie's title is a bad pun (it's equally bad in English - "Frostbite") you know you're going to be in for a good time. After endless amounts of lame comedy and drama productions from Sweden, it's refreshing to see that Anders Banke tries something new: a hilarious, suspenseful vampire movie, the first vampire movie to have ever come out of Sweden. In a way, it's an epic. Not that Banke's movie is anywhere near pretentious enough to be called an epic.Frostbiten opens with some fantastic footage of a snow-covered, dark landscape, accompanied by haunting music that perfectly set the tone for the movie. Already at this point we can tell this will be different, and infinitely better, than most Swedish films.What comes after that is an amazing, high-paced film with energetic performances and brilliant touches of humour. How can you not laugh at a little dog telling our hero that he's going to burn in hell? Or the fact that the main vampire is killed by a garden gnome? Though it is not perfect (especially not the badly executed ending), Frostbiten is extremely entertaining, clever and positively brilliant. The "shocker" scenes are shocking, the comical scenes are funny, and performances are great all around, with the possible exception of Grete Havnesköld, who is pretty lackluster as Saga, our main character. Emma Åberg's Vega, on the other hand, is an absolute gem.Frostbiten is an amazing film that fulfills all your hopes and makes you believe that Swinema actually has a future. A bizarre, hilarious and competently put together action and gore fest that proves that even Swedish people can make high quality movies.(r#36)