Below Zero (2011)

Jack is an aspiring screenwriter whose goal is to write a movie about a man locked in a freezer. To do this, he needs to be locked in a freezer himself, and he travels to a remote area to do this. It is already cold where Jack goes, but he needs to be even colder. Penny, the quirky woman who picks him up, has an accent straight out of the movie "Fargo", and a son who won't talk; his father took off years ago because he couldn't accept a son who was "different". Whatever Jack needs, she will provide; Jack's agent has provided all the directions. They go to an old slaughterhouse and Jack goes right to work in the freezer, which Penny locks unexpectedly. Jack wants out, but Penny has been told he has to stay there for five days. It isn't cold, though ... yet.As Jack works, we see the movie that he is writing. It's quite dreary; everything looks green, while in the "real world" of the freezer, everything looks blue. Frank (Jack) drives a tow truck and his friend Marty works at the garage. According to the credits, the same actor playing Marty is supposedly Jack's agent, but I don't recall seeing him. Anyway, Frank has an accident inspired by an incident with cows that Jack and Penny had. He has to go in search of a phone, and there isn't much around. He finds an isolated dump of a butcher shop which looks quite familiar, and a demented butcher named Gunnar violently attacking his meat. Gunnar has a creepy son who won't talk. Frank manages to find the phone and call Marty. When Marty calls back, Gunnar angrily says Frank isn't there; he believes this to be true, as Frank is hiding. As Jack makes script changes, we see the film "rewind", and other techniques are used later for rewrites. Occasionally we return to the "real world", where Jack faces one crisis after another. He ends up using a great-looking old typewriter for his writing at one point. Eventually, Jack is under pressure to produce as the thermostat starts getting lowered.Back in the movie within a movie, Frank discovers Paige, who is being held prisoner. And Marty shows up eventually but doesn't exactly have a positive experience with Gunnar.We go through some amazing plot twists in both the "real world" and the movie within a movie. I found it funny when the characters had to figure out what to do next and ended up looking through the pages Jack had typed. And it's not the only time they break the fourth wall.In a flashback we do learn about the other character which the actor playing Gunnar was. He's very different but still scary looking.The ending was quite unexpected (to me, anyway) but very satisfying.The movie within a movie is somewhat effective as a B horror movie. Michael Berryman is a very frightening and intimidating villain, yet loving as a father, in his own way. The young actor quite creepy for a kid. Kristin Booth is very convincing when she is cold, but frightened? Not as talented in that situation. She's better in her "real world" role.I've heard the name Edward Furlong. He's pretty good, I guess. Nothing overly distinctive.I felt comfortable with Michael Eisner. He was sort of the voice of reason when he could be. The "real world" has its own interesting suspense qualities. And there is occasional comedy in both. This most definitely isn't for kids. The sound went out a lot since this was broadcast TV. I know what that means. And that's just the bad language. Maybe when cleaned up for TV, some kids can handle it.Is this any good? Well, it's different.

The basic premise of the movie is that of a horror story writer seeking some inspiration for writing his latest story, by going to a rural farm where he'll have some peace and quiet, and a prearranged eerie atmosphere given that he'll stay inside the farm's slaughterhouse. As he'll soon find out, he got more than he bargained for. Nothing too original about the storyline, but it's always a good starting point for a horror movie.The problem was that the story didn't develop in a coherent way and many of the subsequent twists and turns in the plot seemed both trivial and unnecessary. There was no real moment of horror nor was there any eerie atmosphere throughout the movie. Many horror movies get away with bad scripts thanks to good directing, where a build-up of atmosphere and the occasional horror moment draw you into the story and make you forget about any plot holes or incoherence.The problem here was that there was no real atmosphere. Partly, this was due to bad character casting. Miss "piggy laugh" was way too young and ordinary-looking for her role as some redneck farm lady, and the main character seemed more like a bored heavy metal-loving teenager than a professional horror writer fighting his inner daemons. Even so, the director could have saved the day with some "camera magic", adding a few extra flashback moments here and there and backing up the dialogs with fitting background music, just to get some atmosphere going. That's what separates good directors from bad, good directors don't just follow the script as a textbook manual and leave it up to the actors to make or break the movie, especially not when it's plain obvious that the main actors are unable to carry out their parts properly.

"You know what they say about writing about monsters, you got to be careful not to become one." Jack (Furlong) is a struggling screen writer with a bad case of writer's block. Him and his agent come up with the idea of locking himself in a freezer until he finishes writing. While he is in the freezer writing about his serial killer the line between real and imagined begins to blur and Jack is finding it hard to distinguish what is real and what his mind is doing to him. This is another movie where the idea is better then the actual movie. While there are some creepy parts in this I found it confusing. The idea of Jack not able to tell what is real and what isn't is neat, but the problem is that the movie jumps all over the place and it is very hard to relax watching it because you never know what is going on. Normally that would be a good thing because you feel what the character is feeling but it comes off as being like there was a new writer every ten minutes and it was all cut together that way. I found it very hard to follow and by the end I found it hard to be surprised about the twist. Overall, not bad but a little confusing to follow. I give it a C.

Sounded like a great idea; a guy with writer's block decides, with his agent's blessing, to get locked into a slaughterhouse, so that he will have no distractions while he completes the script for a horror movie; forget it, this doesn't work at any level. Edward Furlong is fine as the writer, but the story is ridiculous and the format annoying beyond belief. At the start, Furlong is in truck being driven by a woman who is doing a dead on impression of the Frances McDormand's character from Fargo. This is not anywhere near that great Coen brother masterpiece. The movie flashes back and forth between Furlong typing on his laptop and a bald bad guy who looks like he has been in the sun too long, cutting up people with an axe and a hacksaw. The writer puts himself and a woman trapped by the unnamed villain. There is also a little boy who never speaks. The whole thing makes no sense, and the ending is dumb. Do not waste your valuable time on this tedious film.