SO ANYWAY, this has become a bit of a family legend, and thus you can imagine my surprise and joy when I came, by accident, looking in my netflix instant queue, upon this gem of a film:

Apparently a real film, “FROZEN,” according to its wikipedia page, was made in 2010 by Adam Green and received “mixed to positive” reviews upon its release, which frankly I find difficult if not impossible to believe. For my friends, I watched this movie.

Let me just recap the plot for you, as I did via increasingly hilarious text message live-blogging to several friends, as well as the aforementioned brother, who just kept texting back “I do not believe you.”

Three shitty kids go skiing one weekend at what appears to be a janky one-lift operation that must be driving distance from their college. Wikipedia calls it a “New England ski resort,” so that could mean any number of things, but not, presumably, that a certain upcoming plot point could in any way be even remotely feasible. I will get to that in a moment.

Three shitty kids go skiing but oh no! They don’t want to buy lift tickets, which are admittedly scandalously expensive, lets be honest, even at a shitty New England hill where the snow is like cement. I DIGRESS. They talk the one dude’s girlfriend into basically bribing the lift operator to get them free tickets, another thing I have never heard of happening but I am pretty square. I just don’t know how the lift operator would have access to that kind of thing, I mean, he’d have to, like, go with you to the office and make up some story, and does he even get “all the free day-passes he wants?” that seems unlikely. Anyway the girlfriend is informed that the lift operator, who is fat and therefore a loser, will totally do it for her because she is “a girl.” She’s game, because as is later established in the “plot,” she wants her boyfriend’s mean pot head friend to stop being mean to her for stealing his friend away from him, classic homoerotic tension. So she goes up to the lift operator–who is wearing those lame gray earmuffs with the invisible head band you see like in the Sky Mall catalogue and which I absolutely guarantee you are not worn by lift operators anywhere in the known universe, because lift operators are total badasses–and she’s like “Um hi? My girlfriends? We didn’t bring my mom’s credit card?” And the guy’s like “whatever, fine,” and somehow gets her 3 free day passes without leaving his post at the chairlift (?) and then when she skis up with two dudes he cocks an eyebrow and goes “GIRLfriends?” And that’s when it’s time to cue the sweet guitar solo WOOOOOOOOOO!

The dude and girlfriend are snowboarding; the mean friend is skiing. When ribbed about this he insists that skiing is cooler than snowboarding, and that snowboarding is just a “fad” that will pass in ten years, which was a viable conversation people actually had when I was in 8th grade, i.e. the mid 1990′s. Then he refers to the Iraq War. Later the girlfriend will discuss September 11 and how that would be such a bad way to die, so the movie is topical and full of useful metaphors, as long as you don’t know what a metaphor is.

So they ski all day, the girl is bad at it of course, it irritates the mean guy, the girl is constantly getting her feelings hurt, it’s like, did someone literally write this when they were in 8th grade in the mid 1990′s? The gender dynamics seem to uphold this theory. Then they used search-and-replace to replace all mentions of “The Berlin Wall” and “Milli Vanilli” and “George Bush” with “Iraq,” “September 11,” and George W. Bush.”

At the end of the day, everyone is taking their last run, even though it’s somehow full-on nightfall, like DARK, which, at this point, in terms of realism or lack thereof, it’s like, who’s counting. The guys wanna take one more run, COME ON, fat lift operator who we already blatantly humiliated right in his face! Let us go up one more time even though you put the flag on the back of the chairlift to alert the guys at the top of the mountain that there were no more people on the chairlift! COME ON!!!! DON’T BE A DICK!!!!!!!

So that happens. Then I thought the lift operator would intentionally strand them up there, which would have been kind of rad, but instead he just like wanders off and the next guy who comes to finish his shift doesn’t know there’s people still on the lift. So the guys at the top see the chair with the flag, and they phone down and are like “that’s it, lets go home,” so the guy at the bottom shuts the lift off. CLOSE UP OF HIS HAND SHUTTING IT OFF OMG

Really I should not have bothered with this preamble because CHECK THIS SHIT OUT

so the kids are on the lift and it stops. they’re all “hey! we’re still up here!” They’re all joking and talking about September 11 when boom-boom-boom the lights go out. The mountain is in darkness. A cloud blows across the moon. The girlfriend IMMEDIATELY starts FREAKING OUT, which is what girls do whenever anything unusual happens. The guy is brave and comforts her. The mean guy tells her to shut up. They wait for about 4 minutes and then decide they have been forgotten and thus are going to die up there, because the mountain is only open on weekends and today is sunday. Is that even a real thing? Whatever.

Immediately upon realizing this, the mean guy says he has to pee or he’ll bust. So he pees. Gross, etc. Girl very disturbed to realize she will have to pee off chairlift. JUST LIKE SEPTEMBER 11

So after about 8 minutes the mean guy says to the girl, “hey, you’ve got frostbite, don’t touch it!” and the girl is like “what???” and then the boyfriend grits his teeth and clearly decides he is going to heroically save her because seeing the frostbite on her beautiful trusting innocent face was just too much. He’s all “I’m gonna jump!” and they’re all “you’re crazy it’s too high!” and he’s all “Whatever I’m doing it!” (the dialogue is excellent)

He jumps, and everything goes KEERUNCH and then it’s all kind of hazy and echo-y but then we see from his perspective that his legs are not just broken from landing in the soft snow, no, they are not broken but they are CRUSHED, they are MANGLED, they look like a SNOW CAT RAN OVER THEM. Bones are stickin’ out every which way! Blood is jetting out. This was some fall! It surely did not seem that high to me, nor the snow as hard as concrete! Even if you landed on concrete, would that even happen?? This was my favorite dialogue of the entire movie:

“ohhh, oh my god, oh my god….my legs are broken, I BROKE BOTH MY LEGS”

He’s sitting up in the snow with his crushed legs all akimbo out in front of him and blood pooling around him and they’re making jokes back and forth, you know, making light of it as one does, when suddenly what do we expect to appear in basically suburban New England on a mountain almost completely deforested and covered every day with hundreds and hundreds of people and machines and grilled-cheese kiosks?

WOLVES!

(see above re: impossible upcoming plot point involving basically suburban highly-settled densely populated New England ski resort)

The guy with the crushed legs goes “Oh shit! Oh shit! THERE’S A WOLF!” But it’s not just one wolf, it’s a PACK of them, all sleek and strong yet so desperate for food that they have invaded a ski mountain and have been just waiting by this chairlift for someone to fall off of it. So the wolves come and the guy starts screaming “DON’T YOU LET HER LOOK! DON’T YOU LET HER LOOK!” and the guy on the chair yells “I WON’T! I WON’T MAN!” And so he covers the girls ears with his hands while the guy gets eaten by a pack of wolves, everybody screaming, oh it’s awful.

When it’s over, the wolves disappear like ghosts, as wolves do, and the guy and girl on the chairlift are like “oh my god! oh my god!” and then the girl is like “you should have stopped him!” and the guy is like “what? YOU should have!” then they’re like “Fuck you!” and then they start arguing about who was better friends with the dead guy, presumably all torn up and strewn about beneath them in grisly bloody bits. Then the girl apologizes. Then to cheer each other up they start telling stories about middle school.

Then morning comes! And the girl’s hand (I forgot to tell you earlier she dropped her glove while trying to light a cigarette, so she’s had no glove this whole time but somehow her hand is still functioning, which, again, don’t get me started (also I want to point out that although they are all literally freezing to death none of them have their coats zipped all the way up or their hoods on or even their scarves pulled over their faces, which is great for me because as the audience it’s important for me to look at their three shining visages for 2 hours, excuse me, 94 minutes)) is actually STUCK to the safety bar of the chair. So she rips it off and there’s lots of blood and skin. Then the guy wakes up and is like “I’m gonna climb across the cable and get to the pole and climb down it,” which, although he tried it during the night, before the guy got eaten by wolves but after he broke both his legs horrifically, did not work. But this time it works! Which again, seems like you should have tried a little harder last night dude, but oh well. So his hands too are all shredded and bleeding (the chairlift cable being “razor sharp” as the dude on the ground with the broken legs pre-wolves yelled up at him during his first Tarzan-like misadventure) but he makes it, and climbs down, and is immediately attacked by the pack of wolves again, who came out of nowhere. He stabs one with a ski pole and the others are like “oh shit, a ski pole, holy shit lets get out of here” and they run away but then they come back as he’s sliding down the mountain on a snowboard using it like a sled and they all disappear over a hill and so the girl doesn’t know what happened. Did he make it? WHAT DO YOU THINK

So she spends another night somehow not dying and retaining a functional hand, which is truly miraculous, although she keeps wiping her frostbitten cheek and bits of cheek fall off while this sad, slow, kind of really half-assed Philip Glass rip-off music plays, which, good call, Adam Green’s music guy. And then she decides to jump off the chair? Even though her boyfriend crushed both his legs somehow and then got eaten by a pack of wolves doing that same thing. Then again, I couldn’t think of a better idea.

So she goes to jump but then the chair somehow detaches from the cable–which is another thing that happens all the time, with chairlifts, jesus christ sometimes it’s like, “is it raining chairlifts or did another chairlift just somehow become detached from its cable and fall and yet we are never reading about the massive ensuing lawsuits in the newspaper??”–and FALLS! But then a teeny thin strip of wire (?) is holding it to the cable still so it stops her halfway. Where a normal person would probably have let go and jumped at that moment, she holds on for a really long time and then lets go and lands, and does not break her legs, which is great, but then the chair goes ahead and falls and lands on her. So her leg too is crushed. She starts crawling down the mountain. At one point she comes across the grisly remains of the mean guy and there are like 20 wolves surrounding him and they growl at her but they are too busy fighting over the grisly remains to bother her, so she keeps on scootin’.

She makes it down and then lies in the middle of the road until a car stops and takes her to the hospital. The film closes with her looking out the window of the car, “Gerry” style, while in echoing reverbed tones her boyfriend’s voice says “you’re gonna be okay babe.” You know, from before.

It all put me in mind of the classic Robert Service poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

there are strange things done in the midnight sun
by the men who moil for gold
the arctic trails have their secret tales
that would make your blood run cold
the northern lights have seen queer sights but the queerest they ever did see
was that night on the marge of lake lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee

CHAIRLIFT THRILLER