Horror Movie Review: Deep Freeze (2001)

If you’ve seen one ‘nature gone wrong’ film, you’ve seen them all. No matter what the story is, who the characters are, where it is set, and what the monster is, they all follow a formula. A tried and tested formula that has existed for decades. Why deviate from what has worked before? Which is the attitude Deep Freeze (also known as Ice Crawlers) takes, much to its detriment.

Though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some entertainment value, as the creature effects are pretty cool. Even if what the creature is, is a bit silly.

Now, you know you’re in trouble when a film has three credited writers. It screams a messy story that required rewrites and adjustments. What you may not expect is a story that is quite boring. One that features a ton of forgettable characters, and has an overarching corporate villain that both makes no sense and is completely unnecessary. Writers Robert Boris, Dennis A. Pratt, and Matthew Jason Walsh sure did a bad job here. However, director John Carl Buechler certainly tried to make sense of their mess.

Set at a new oil drilling base in the Antarctic, a group of post-graduate research students have been hired to survey the facility. Their goal is to prove that the place is safe and won’t have a negative impact on the environment. Staffed by a skeleton crew, this place holds secrets, one which is unknown to everyone, for now. You see, they’ve unearthed a prehistoric trilobite and it has a taste for flesh.

That story summation is the best I can do. For reasons that will escape most, Deep Freeze has an overly complex story regarding science, corporate greed, the effects of humanity on nature, and more. It’s so frustrating because all anyone is going to want to see is the huge prehistoric trilobite munching its way through a cast of literal nobodies.

Alexandra Kamp, Götz Otto, David Millbern, Karen Nieci, Howard Halcomb, David Lenneman, and Allen Lee Haff might all be fine actors, but with a script this bad, they have no chance of showing it. Who lives, who dies, nobody will care, because Deep Freeze makes no effort to make you care.

Who most will find themselves rooting for, is the trilobite. After all, it didn’t ask to be messed with, and it’s probably just scared and defending itself. Justice for this poor prehistoric trilobite!

As stated already, the effects are pretty cool and there are some good moments of gore. In particular, one scene in a bedroom where a character finds the trilobite chest deep in the girl he slept with. Don’t ask how. It’s arguably the film’s most memorable moment, but that’s not saying a lot, as it’s a shockingly unremarkable film overall.

It plays out exactly as most would expect, with the survivors being the ones with the most dialogue/scenes and there being an even bigger version of the prehistoric trilobite at the end. If you do manage to make it this far, it doesn’t impress, and most will have forgotten this film exists the moment it ends. There are just far more fun and interesting versions of this style of film out there to care one bit about it.