Frozen Olympics of Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS

2006 - ***

Emily Blunt stars in this as a college student who accepts a ride home with a dubious freshman-ish student (Ashton Holmes), and she nails a character few other actresses seem to even realize exist - the old-before-their-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long, testing the patience of dudes who will put up with anything to a point, and she's always crossed that point and now has become so used to being alone she barely knows how to make a friend. I've been her friend, girls like that, one is even in one of my own movies! I can say that because I know she'll never read this, just like Blunt's character wouldn't. She's the senior version of the sophomore (?) girl in Ti West's 2009 classic, House of the Devil (if she never took that job and instead gradually let her spacey ambivalence about her own safety harden into brass). Their journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! Director Gregory Jacobs' film would be creepy enough just from Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that gradually fades away once they're stuck in a weird ghost time loop on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played in a way that sticks with you by Martin Donovan.

Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two hander with a stalker and an antisocial narcissist, but along the way come a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality. Which is fine, we can dig the way the collapse of the social sphere and an orienting symbolic structure can make on privy to the tricks of ghosts, as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place. There isn't. But at least Blunt gets a chance to carry a film and she makes the most of it.


There's about eight hundred Dead of Winter movies, but this is the 2007 one, also known as Lost Signal (neither title is very good) where a couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) on acid can't tell they're New Years' shots where spiked with LSD, but they went into the bathroom to do a line of coke (or some think, meth), so even though they all clearly don't know how lines are done (they snort at bump-level speed), they should at least know they're high when they start hallucinating all over the place, and to not take it seriously. Instead these two seem genuinely lost, mistaking their hallucinations for reality. Hey, I can dig it. Driving when you're tripping way too hard, especially in winter at night with frost on the windshield, is very bizarre. Your sense of 3-D space is way off, so the road feels like it's just a magazine picture in your lap and the frost on your windshield seems to be outside it, looming up at you like a crystal skull hand from God, when the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat - for a second you feel like a UFO is hovering overhead, and you have to trust your instincts and let your body just do its job and go neither slow nor fast while you pray or sing a song ... I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice effects in that vein. And I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors, who clearly have never been lost in the woods or taken too much LSD and become convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually very much a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching you from behind some partition, but no one else can see him and you realize he's your death psychopomp, waiting for you to make a mistake so he can rush up and snort your soul. You go up to talk to him and he seems genuinely surprised you can even see him. But then you get up close and you realize he's just a trick of the light, a moonlit reflection off a golf club in the corner below a macrame owl on the wall. Yeah that's right you bastard, you think, you better run! But then the floor creaks behind you and you realize you better not press your luck.


That's why it's so important to try all the psychedelics when you're young, so you know what they are when and if you are accidentally or intentionally dosed without your knowledge. In this case, the buddy probably meant to tell them but was so high they'd already forgotten. You never know, but the constant cutting back and forth to the toasty police station and various phone calls amidst law enforcement saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just show up out of the darkness), and yet this was apparently based on a true story, with 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep, and anyone whose experiences in there have ever been LSD-fueled or just through the eyes of kids know how the ancient magic of the woods can bend objective reality way out of proportion. The hallucinations here are much less elaborate than, say, the top flight 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). We all can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see on the right dosage -- the stuff is floating in the higher dimensions just waiting to haunt the first person to see them, and the trees are in on it!


The low budget is no problem as this is a great modernist ambiguity masterpiece, which anyone whose every been lost a block from (or even inside) their apartment on acid, or who appreciates the great works of modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like The Shining(which is even quoted in the film) or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand. Director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver know the full range of horrors that LSD in a receptive mind can create from normal winter sights and sounds and having gone to college up in wintry Syracuse I can authenticate a lot of the visions deep winter in the woods can create. Your mileage may vary but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up, and Dead is, at least for a decent chunk, a great entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic film, one of those few and rare mysteries, wherein we can't whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by an external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces.