Freeze me

The rape-revenge genre is rife with dodgy exploitation pics and under-the-counter sleaze, with I Spit On Your Grave (Day of the Woman) being the most (in)famous and, possibly, the most misogynistic. Artistic merit is not something the rape-revenge film concerns itself with (let's face it, 'Last House on the Left' is a crude, artless fluke), concentrating more on graphic sex / nudity for graphic sex / nudity's sake. Oh, and the rape has to be really horrible to justify the rapists' sticky end (no pun intended).

If you're watching a good example of the genre, you'll be putting yourself in the place of the woman and relating to her, something the horror genre frequently does (it's one of the only genres where men will relate to a woman) and wishing her attackers dead - in any way possible, not necessarily in a sensationalist way.

I think Freeze Me (or Freezer, here in the UK) succeeds in this, as the plight of the female character is always put first. Agreed, there are a lot of gratuitous shots of her naked body, but these act as a reminder to her beauty and frailty. When it comes to the rape, it is often more implied and in no way staged to be titillating, something the more dubious examples try to achieve, rather disturbingly.

Freeze Me, therefore, isn't exactly an enjoyable experience (I'll have to look up the word 'entertainment'), but it is thought-provoking, well-made on a very tight budget, and incredibly disturbing. One of the best examples of this horror sub-genre.

Freeze Me is Ishii's best film since Gonin, and displays all of the characteristic visual finesse, pacing and editing skills which give him his reputation. A rape-revenge film is hard to do and stay on the right side of comfort: too often the female victim is exploited and seem to 'enjoy' the violent assault, while the (usually male) viewer is encouraged to oogle at the exposed, yielding flesh. Not that I am against exposing the female form, and certainly Ms Inoue is frequently very nice to look at, but it is to Ishii's credit that the crimes are shown as undoubtedly painful, and as humiliating as they surely would be. Apart from some nudity in the plentiful bath and shower scenes, perhaps as a sop to the burger crowd, her unpleasant ordeal is filmed with full sympathy for the victim. The video of her orginal rape is a necessary intrusion, but even here it is in its proper place, viewed as as a flashback not, as it must have been tempting to do, as a over-the top-first act, pileing cruelty on cruelty.

Set mostly within Chihiro's small apartment, Freeze Me quickly assumes a claustrophobia which is a chilly and as constricting as one of her newly acquired deep freezes. Within this setting, the three principal killings are staged with sufficient variety and flair to make them distinctive. A stand out is the bath tub killing, a magnificently staged murder which is amongst the best minutes in the film, while the death twitches of the second rapist's legs reminded me of a similarly shocking moment in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

If the basic direction of the film is excellent, then how much more one wishes that the script broadened out more. The rapes, the revenge, the batty soliliquies, the discovery, the denouement - these all follow with the logic of one of those cheesy 70's horror compilation films, where plot expansion is sacrificed due to the demands of the portmanteau format. Here Ichii has considerably more space but spends a lot of the running time on showing a succession of repeating, dramatic events. Often thrilling and well mounted in themselves, they restrict matters to a very narrow narrative path, incidentally almost entirely removing Chihiro from any social context. Because of this she loses some sympathy. The truth is that, once the last body appears on screen, the story has nowhere left to go except into the rain. It's been one hell of a ride in the meantime, but Freeze Me ultimately offers nothing more than a train of horrors seen rightly or wrongly as justification in themselves, and which create story cul-de-sac. Ichii of course has to close his show somehow, and sidesteps the issue with what is practically a narrative sleight of hand, leaving the viewer curiously unsatisfied. It is as if the Wild Bunch have killed all the Mexicans, and a stray bullet has got Deke Thornton too.

Interestingly, the HK DVD box shows the heroine apparently frozen, a misleading image to say the least. While perhaps emotionally cold after her traumatising experiences, she never ends up in the cooler herself...

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.

I have seen the cover art for this movie ages ago, and i wanted to watch this thing quite a while now finally had my chance.

Now this movie did came from the same director that did SWEET WHIP, and SWEET WHIP is an amazing movie, this was pretty good as well. That ending was ridiculously depressing it made me really really sad.

This movie is classified as a Splatter film, and no. The movie is very tame gore wise, when i think of a Splatter movie what comes up in my mind is Premutos, DeadAlive, Daddy's Little Girl, Eat, these are gore films to the top, that keep hammering you with gore. Here there barely was any gore. And no that's not a negative to the film i'm just saying there wasn't really any gore here.

Now, as the title suggets, this would be the Asian i spit on your grave in my opinion, just more depressing (the ending). The story is thin as it is, a woman is getting harrased by her past rapists and she gets her revenge. That's pretty much the whole movie, and it works. Just imagine I spit on your grave Asian style.

The acting seems okay, the effects are regular, the story is thin as it is, but it sort of works, the camera, lighting everything is fine. However, i got only one negative: And that's the movie gets extremely repetitive, Just like I spit on your grave, it's just our main anti-villain hero killing off her rapists, that's all. It gets kinda repetitive, but still a fun watch.

If you enjoyed I spit on your grave, Hobo with a shotgun, Ms 47, Machine Girl for example, go for it, you most likely will enjoy this thing. I think the movie was fine.

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.