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Vamping it up Swedish style
FROSTBITEN
Directed by Anders Banke
Certificate 15
CHRISTOPHER Lee’s efforts from around 1956 through to the early 1970s have given TV producers a classy back catalogue of vampire films to screen, and have spawned hundreds copycat tales.
However, it has been some time since the genre was updated. The last truly popular general release vampire flick is perhaps the Keifer Sutherland vehicle Lost Boys – and this was such a teen angst movie as a neck-and-fang film.
But Frostbiten, an original and lively horror-comedy, is good enough to give vamp flick lovers a Christmas holiday treat.
It is a well-paced and funny take on the genre, with enough original moments and a good plot to stand up and be counted.
Our story starts in 1944, when we meet a group of Swedes who are working for the SS in Russia. They meet an unfortunate end. But rather than being shot by the Red Army, they are attacked and feasted on by the undead.
Zoom forward to the present day, and we find that there is a town in the frozen Swedish countryside where things are not as they seem. Could this be someway related to events in the past?
Such a setting gives the plot added gloom – the fact it is dark all day up north in the winter means there is no respite for the humans. Vampires can put in long shifts.
The head of the vampires, the Christopher Lee, if you like, is an archetypal wacky doctor, Professor Gerhard Beckert (Carl Erikson) who, when not conducting experiments in the town hospital, is working in his spare time on the secret of life and death.
Enter the heroes. We meet the town’s new doctor Annika (Petra Nielsen) who arrives in town with her daughter Saga (Grete Havnesköld) in tow.
Poor Saga has a bad feeling. Like every out of the way town in your average horror film, this place just doesn’t feel quite right – which, of course, it isn’t.
As with all good horror movies, the story uses the follies of youth to produce a situation that the teens have to confront.
Saga befriends two youths – one of whom, Sebastian, works in Beckert’s hospital where her mother is seeking employment.
Sebastian steals some mysterious pills from a laboratory at work to take to a party – with some unforeseen side effects.
These include some Six Million Dollar Man attributes – super hearing and sight. However, it also makes the taker develop a lust for blood. It makes for a rather gory night out.
Things at this point begin go awry. Sebastian experiences a classic meet-the-parents style dinner with his girlfriend, where the effects of the pill begin to kick in and leave him feeling a tad uncomfortable.
Frostbiten comes up with some clever gags, a fair few jumps and by simply taking the action to the frozen north a fresh and original take on the horror comedy genre. |
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