Der Kühlschrank - eiskalt, böse und gemein

Young married couple Steve and Eileen Bateman (Dave Simonds and Julia McNeal) move from Ohio to New York City, where they rent an apartment that comes complete with appliances, which sounds good, except that the refrigerator turns out to be possessed and is a portal to Hell.

A film about a fridge that eats people needs to be seriously schlocky and over-the-top, preferably with tons of gore, but The Refrigerator rarely hits the mark: it's weird, for sure, with bizarre performances and random moments of strangeness, but it's also rather boring and uneventful for the most part. Most of the time, all we see is a coloured light emanating from the appliance's interior, and brief shots of people disappearing behind the fridge door.

The film only comes close to the levels of lunacy required in the final act: a man has his leg bitten off by a waste paper bin and his face is mutilated by the blades of a table fan. This unexpected late-in-the-day spot of gore only serves to highlight just how uninspired and lacklustre the rest of the film is. 3/10.

lol.. i saw this movie 8 or 9 years back, and! i still feel obligated to give it a comment.

This is a movie for example when you sit down with friends this movie suddenly runs up in conversation.I personal don't remember much but i do laughed allot, the characters are all first class "beasty boys". And i remember a scene when huge arms came out of the refrigerator and grab someone haha totally wacko.

I'm thinking of renting it again :-)

THE REFRIGERATOR is one of the more cleverly original ideas for a campy horror flick and is pretty much played for laughs. While a bit slow moving at times, this is a must see for all fans of the slapstick comedy/horror sub-genre. If you're a fan of any of the following, then this movie is for you: EVIL DEAD II, STREET TRASH, BASKET CASE, BASKET CASE II, BASKET CASE III, DEAD ALIVE, MEET THE FEEBLES, RABID GRANNIES, or any of Troma's better known releases. If you can imagine an large, evil appliance which is somehow alive, a ghost-in-the-machine device which when opened, has all the ooze and spew of a Peter Jackson special effect, then you have the basic concept of THE REFRIGERATOR, in which machines terrorizes a young NYC housewife. For a low budget flick, this one is very well made, with excellent special effects (though mediocre acting). Highly recommended if you're looking for something a bit different.

According to the quoted line on the cover of the VHS-box, The New York Post claimed this film is a nearly perfect and extremely tense amalgamation of "Poltergeist", "The Amityville Horror" and "Rosemary's Baby"…. What the hell? And that's an actual newspaper that said this? "The Refrigerator" isn't the worst 90's horror film out there, but it's VERY silly, totally incompetent and extremely cheap. The premise is retarded and seems to come straight from the over-imaginative mind of a flipping Marihuana-junkie. Dig this: a young couple (he strangely resembles Jerry Seinfeld and she looks a little like Heather Graham) invests their money in the crappiest apartment of the most pauperized New York ghetto area. The building's owner may very well be Satan himself and the fridge in the kitchen is actually a direct doorway to hell! Pretty soon after they moved in, the cooling device from hell causes Steve to hallucinate (he wakes up screaming he's the waffle maker, and similar crazy things) and begins to terrorize Eileen. The fridge then starts to kill random visitors and Eileen teams up with the flamenco-dancing janitor to defeat it. "The Refrigerator" features absolutely no horrific atmosphere of tension, but it's still warmly recommended to fans of cheesy & nonsensical 80-90's horror. Quite logically, if you spot a movie with this title, you know not to anticipate brilliantly written dialogs or intelligent plot twists. You get a couple of ridiculous situations, grotesque make-up effects and demented characters. Especially the climax is a total laugh riot. Preferably a movie to watch when there's beer and friends around.

This exercise in cornball depicts a couple who moves into a New York apartment...only to find out that it has a killer refrigerator! "The Refrigerator" seems like the sort of movie that they probably made knowing that they were making a totally silly movie. Personally, I thought that John Schlesinger's movie "The Believers" (starring Martin Sheen as a man who moves to NYC and comes across a demonic offshoot of santeria) was more interesting.

But even so, this movie is a lot of fun. The first time that the refrigerator acted up reminded me a bit of the scene in "Ghostbusters" where Sigourney Weaver finds the monster in her fridge. Not particularly worth seeing, but entertaining.