Frostbitten (Frostbiten, 2006)

Filed Under BBT, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, Vampires, Frostbitten, Frostbiten, Swedish Vampires, All the damn vampires, Talking Dogs, Monstervision

 

 
Movie Reviews with BBT Critic Jef Taylor

 

 

You can understand why a teenaged girl wouldn’t be happy about moving to northern Sweden.  She doesn’t have any friends, there’s snow everywhere, and the sun won’t come up for another month.  Plus there’s all the damn vampires.

Frostbitten is Sweden’s first vampire movie, and according to the filmmakers, Sweden’s first horror movie.  It’s a respectable addition to the genre, and since the Blade and Underworld series have made me dread Hollywood’s attempts at bats and fangs, I’m happy to see it.  Frostbitten has no vampires wielding guns, wearing black trench coats, or otherwise acting like hyperactive 13 year-olds who have just seen The Matrix.  Instead there’s a return to an 80’s vampire aesthetic, belonging with The Lost Boys, Near Dark, and Fright Night .

The fact that in the Arctic circle setting "dawn is still a month away" is a good angle, and allows every scene to take place at night.   
(Naturalist’s note: Vampirism is explained to be caused by "a rhabdovirus; similar to rabies but a lot more aggressive."  This might explain its transmission, and the vampires’ strength and fierceness, and even their light sensitivity, but it doesn’t explain their apparent vulnerability to wooden stakes and Catholic iconography.)  Not enough is done with it unfortunately–they could have had vampires attacking people at their breakfast tables or during classes at school.   All hours are vampire hours when it’s dark from dusk till dusk!  We should have had a constant feeling of dread rather than the occasional bit of monstervision–red filter, hand held camera–as our heroine walks to a late night house party.  We’ll see how the Americans handle it in 30 Days of Night, a vampire movie set in Alaska, releasing this month (I’m predicting heavily armed acrobatic vampires in black trench coats).

Apart from the teenagers, we have a divorced capable mom who has come to this darkened icebox to work with a Bela Lugosi look-alike who happens to be a prominent geneticist.  He isn’t working on any unholy experiments with vampire and human blood or anything.  And there’s no way that his incompetent young drug-dealing interns could get at his experiments and contaminate a certain teenage house party.  Could there?  There are some terribly silly moments (talking dogs anyone?) but otherwise a good bloodsucking time is had by almost everyone.  The house party scene calls to mind Peter Jackson’s zombie bloodbath in Brain Dead (aka Dead Alive) but with a little more cleverness and without the lawn mower.  It also functions as a fun parody of kids these days, and their casual drug use.  As one teen vampire put it,  "What a totally uncool way to die."

 

Jef Taylor is a movie reviewer and a naturalist.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Frostbitten (Frostbiten, 2006)”

  1. Gregory Adams on October 8th, 2007 4:15 pm

    Talking dogs? are you certain this isn’t a Japanese film?

    –G

  2. Urbpan on October 9th, 2007 5:24 am

    Talking dogs? are you certain this isn’t a Japanese film?

    Pretty sure. There was only one scene of a teenage girl in her panties, and no raccoons attacking with their testicles.

  3. Gregory Adams on October 9th, 2007 8:05 am

    Ah yes. Imagine how your Urban Species project might have differed if you had been living in Tokyo at the time.

    –G

  4. Bonnie on October 9th, 2007 10:18 am

    racoons attacking with their testicles

    That was such a weird Anime. We sat in a friend’s dorm room and watched that and felt really dumb for doing it afterward.

    As for the vampires…well, I guess it’s a subject that’s been beaten to a very bloody pulp. heh…pun…heh…