Freeze Me (2000)

Rape revenge flick is just so quirky I don't even know what I thought of it.Half way through this I found myself wondering what genre it was. Was it a horror? No, because it wasn't gruesome or scary enough. Was it a drama? No, because there was nowhere near enough depth to the story. Was it a thriller? No, because there was hardly any sense of thrills or tension on display.This stumbling block is always going to be a huge problem. If you cannot classify a story under a specific category, or indeed multiple ones, then it becomes very hard to understand what kind of mindset to watch it in. If it's a thriller then it gets your pulse racing and you instantly 'activate' the mental recesses to put you into that frame of mind so you'll get the most out of it. Likewise horror, and one prepares oneself to be scared or disgusted or whatever. It's like real life - you're not going to elicit any inappropriate emotion for a given situation. You want to panic when you're being chased by a lion, not when you're settling down for a relaxing evening with your wife/husband.With this, I was simply baffled as to how to feel.Chihiro is a young lady who appears to have it all; a good job, an impending marriage to a man she's deeply in love with, and a solid social circle of friends. Indeed, she's in absolute bliss.However, when a man she seems to recognise shows up at her apartment block, she runs from him in a state of panic, and a flashback of a scene from a home movie where the man's eyes dominate the picture appears. Evidently, she knows this man, and is terrified of him. Running back to her apartment she tries to get away from him, but he sticks to her like glue and takes over her home.Essentially, it's safe to say that he (Kojima) is someone from Chohiro's past who she hoped never to see again. That would be a synopsis and sets the stall for the movie. Well, so you would think. The problem I have with this review is the movie has very little content. Basically rapist #1 shows up, gets killed by the vilified woman, then his buddy shows up and the same happens, then the last one. And to store the bodies of these perps? Chohiro buys industrial freezers.And that's it.Obviously, there's an ending here, but you can see it coming a mile off and the events leading up to it are also as inevitable.The major flaw with this movie is there are simply no layers to it. It's uninteresting because it never makes anything happen.There's just so little plot that it makes rating it impossible, plus the added fact that it even adopts comedy at one point shows how completely directionless it actually is.It's shallow, vacuous, and devoid of meat. However, it *is* different, and is extremely quirky as a result, which I must give it credit for.However, add some overwrought rape scenes to the mix and you finish this movie entirely confused as to what you made of it.I think more could have been done with the idea, and plenty more to make it plausible. Which is another flaw; to say you have to suspend your disbelief is an understatement. It's just absolutely incredible how daft much of this is. So many things happen which seem to abandon logic entirely, and they don't even succeed in entertaining given how utterly daft they are. You find yourself asking just why she is acting the way she is, why she is doing what she is doing. Is it entertaining? Dunno. I suppose it killed (pardon the pun) a couple of hours but really, it was just so narrow.Strange.

The main character in this thing is so dumb, and others so simplistically motivated, that the whole plot would appear to play out in some neglected village for the mentally incompetent. What girl, threatened with rape would flee a morning rush-hour sidewalk to race back to her apartment elevator through one doorway after another with a rapist on her heels? What terrified girl would not mention a word of her distress to another workaday girl leaving the apartment just as she passes? What girl would not at least scream for help? Then, after raping her - once he's awoken from a long gratifying sleep, while the victim has sat totally free, but anxiety-stricken on the bed - the villain threatens to shame her if she doesn't cooperate - by distributing some grainy pictures he's printed off a bubblejet. And if the threat alone wasn't stupid enough (i.e., distributing proof of his own guilt), he indeed wanders into the apartment hallway stark naked and starts stuffing the prints in the hallway mail boxes. The girl, terrified of embarrassment or loss of face, does not simply lock her door behind the idiot and call for the men in white coats to come pick him up, or even the police (heaven forbid), but is so shamed she leads him back in for more.Now if the above isn't mind-twisting enough, imagine the girl heading off to work the next day and taking extreme care that no one suspect that a rapist has taken over her apartment and enslaved her.In fact, the actress should feel an embarrassment almost as extreme as the character, and I can't but wonder if the men in white coats haven't reclaimed the director.Enough. There's no plot to spoil. And the action - if we can jokingly call it that - is so slow moving it elevates the stupidity of this flick to a monumental stature, squelching any potential for slapstick - it's about as fast-moving as Claire's Knee or Ma Nuit Chez Maude. The girl can't even kill intelligently - no knife, no poison, though she's cooking for him - she kills her first man with a blow on the head from one-quart plastic water bottle! I recommend - if you really MUST see this flick - that it be viewed fast forward at at least 30X. Don't worry, you'll still find it yawningly slow. But about mid-way into it, you may come to suspect, as I did in a kind of weak "ah-hah experience", that this is apparently a simplistic sex flick and we men are supposed to be excited at watching an imbecilic main character get raped. Indeed, as the "action" progresses from dumb to dumber, the viewer is rewarded with more and more nude shower scenes. It might have been immensely better if the director and scene writer had stripped and gotten in with her and begun howling with laughter - something a la Mel Brooks, with song and dance. But no, this dud "baka na" crew takes itself seriously. What sheer stupidity!Japan can and does produce good flicks - at least I still try to keep the faith... What a shame the good ones are unavailable in Zone 1 or 2, i.e., sold only in Zone 3 DVDs out of Japan, with $20 shipping costs and no subtitles. Who knows... maybe this Freeze Me flick is a for-export-only product and the director thinks the whole non-Japanese world is peopled with idiots. If so, I won't comment in regard to his judgment.This deserves about a "zero", or a minus-something, if that would stop the dummies who made this, though they probably aren't capable of any other employment.

!!!!! SPOILERS !!!!!A woman is raped by three men then five years later one of the rapists runs into the victim and wants to use her as a sex slave I had a problem with this premise right away - What`s the chances of a rapist running into his victim like that ? And why use a former victim as a sex slave ? The plot holes continue with a scene where the victim dispatches one of the trio by hitting him over the head with a plastic bottle filled with water . She could have easily have used a kitchen knife but I suppose that would have been less dramatic . I guess all these vigilante/revenge dramas suffer from the plotholes seen in FREEZER ( As it`s called on the sci-fi channel )where the hero stands at a street corner and by an amazing power of coincidence just happens to chance along a scumbag who murdered his wife or raped his daughter see also THE EXTERMINATOR or DEATH WISH FREEZER does have some artistic worth in it`s favour , and despite some violence it is a fairly understated film unlike I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE so the two shouldn`t be compared . It`s just that FREEZER is spoiled slightly by some unlikely occurances while the plot isn`t anything more than " Rape victim increases collective morality of mankind by exterminating some scumbags " type story

What "I Spit On Your Grave" should've been. Well, OK, the plot advancement might be a tad contrived, and the weird way a rape victim in this film is portrayed, at least, I hope women aren't actually so victimized by shame in Japan as to maintain a stoic silence that is so firmly entrenched the antagonists can actually blackmail the victim vying against her fear that others might know of her "shame" of being deflowered, abused, or molested. Her inaction for a large portion of the film is agonizing, but understandable in consideration of the themes of the film (action vs. victimization, social shame vs. personal safety, social roles and double standards for men vs. for women). It's an educational bit of work, nicely shot, and generally engaging. Loads better than I had expected it to be. On a neat side note, the star of this, Harumi Inoue, was having dinner at a Sushi joint on fourth, bracketed by a pair of very Yakuza boss looking dudes, tans and black turtlenecks and thick ropey gold chains and tiny glinting glasses, real imposing. My pal Shotaro recognized her. Kind of weird to see a woman out calmly eating sushi that I'd just seen scantly clad, drenched in blood with murder on her mind. Guess that's an illustration of filmic reality vs. actual reality for you.