The Refrigerator

Low-budget cult films like this keep me alive! The acting is awful and so is the directing, but The Refrigerator is just such a hillarious killing machine. It just moves and grabs someone. This film was so funny and just plain wonderful. Ranks up there with one of the surefire cult classics. If this isn't a cult classic, I don't know what is. Try to find this film on video. If you can ever find it, buy it because it's rare and hard to find and A MUST HAVE for anyone serious interested in the horror genre. I found it for $2.00 in some mom and pop store in New Jersey, and I watch it every now and then. You'll get more then one or two chuckles! ***1/2out of****With writing that's so bad, it's good!

Geeez! Not nearly a quarter of the fun the title promises this movie to be. A refrigerator is terrorizing a couple who just moved into an apartment. Is the damn thing possessed? Is it just a freezing fridge-monster killing people? I have no idea... No explanation, no story, no gore... Just silly nonsense (and some occasional cheesiness that might have you cracking a smile or sigh deeply) in a flick that takes itself way too serious for whichever reasons I can't imagine. I mean, its title is "The Refrigerator" and it's a horror movie. What went wrong? I secretively was hoping this could just be as much fun as "The Slime" (AKA "Slime City"). Sadly, it's not. As soon as I figured that out, I started wondering if this was going to be a profound piece of art cinema filled with philosophical ponderings about frozen meat & vegetables and uplifted by loving musings at a temperature below zero. I think I just saw the wrong movie. Or something got lost in translation. Whatever.

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.

There's a whole world of horror films that are positively hilarious without intending to be...however, horror film parodies generally don't work well. This one is slightly better than most, and it's slickly made for a movie at this lowish production level. Still, THE REFRIGERATOR is as slight on laughs as it is on scares, and would probably have been more successful as a short subject than a feature.

The idea of a refrigerator being the Earthly gateway to Hell carries with it a lot of possibilities, but this film just doesn't begin to realize its own potential. It may be fun enough as a casual time-filler, but ultimately comes off feeling like a feature-length SNL skit. Take this one or leave it...you may find it enjoyable. I, for one, stand at the equator with one foot in the "no" zone.

4.5 out of 10 stars.

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.