Aug 24 2008
Baby It’s Cold Outside
The Chilling (1989) ** - This recent DVD release from Code Red is a pretty minor work in the late eighties zombie cannon. It has that straight to tape feel that plagues so many films made after 1987, where the pace is bizarre. Not necessarily slow, but awkward mostly due to editing and not enough coverage of the material to make the scenes flow by correctly. Though the entire last forty five minutes of this movie is all action, it still has this odd, at times uninvolving feel. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story deals with a cryogenics lab that is secretly using the people being stored there for parts to support their black market organ sales business. The movie opens with an upscale man having his wife interred in the lab to be thawed out later. Meanwhile we see her being gutted and filled with green goo so she can be propped up in a cryo tube and her organs sold to some South American bidder. Troy Donahue plays the doctor who owns the lab and Linda Blair plays his on staff grief councilor who helps the clients with the transition. We then rather jarringly cut to the rich client’s son in a hotel room planning a robbery. After he gorily kills one of his partners for talking to his girlfriend the head to the band heist that goes very, very wrong. Naturally he ends up in the cryogenics lab too. Then on Halloween night there is a horrible lightening storm that blows the power and Dan Haggerty as the security guard (giving the best performance in the film) takes the cryo tubes outside so they will stay cold(!). Naturally lightening hits ALL the tubes and brings the dead back to life. Then it is poorly lit zombie mayhem from here on out. The zombies all have intricately sculpted masks that have no facial movements whatsoever. There is a little bit of gore, but the zombies bleed the green goo they had been embalmed with. The good guys eventually figure out that the lab is being used as the organ scam and a unique way to kill the zombies too. The movie is alright, but seems to be locked in the low budget dance where they couldn’t quite afford to do things just a little bit better. There is some impressive miniature work and sets, and some okay effects, but it’s the direction and cinematography that is lacking most of the time. The performances are kind of stiff as well. But I give them credit for really taking the bull by the horns and letting the movie rip for the entire second half with out a moments rest. All in all it is marginally better than the typical late eighties direct to video junk, but not nearly as good as most of the early eighties splatter fest that lived on drive in screens a few years before. The Code Red DVD this time from Shriek Show is decent enough. The transfer is dark and grainy at times, probably inherent in the source material. There is an abundance of behind the scenes video footage, most of it kind of dull until they get to the effects stuff. There is also a investor promo trailer that is basically the whole movie in five minutes as well as the normal preview.
