Frost Giant (2010)

Plot

In 1825, the HMS Fury went missing during a disastrous expedition to the Arctic Circle. The modern-day descendant of one of the explorers has devoted his career to finding the sunken remains of the ship. When he and his team finally excavate the wrecked hull from the ice, they discover that the ship was sunk deliberately to act as a frosty tomb for an alien which could threaten the planet. Now they have released the monster to bring terror to the world once again.

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Sy-Fy drum up their usual clichés in abandon with a new monster in the form of Frost Giant, the same sort of monster-on-the-loose film that they’ve almost cornered the market for. It’s really hard to get motivated to write a review for this, such was the lethargic nature of the film and the nondescript plot. Even trying to write this review literally moments after finishing watching, it is hard to remember anything of note to talk about. Frost Giant isn’t so much a film that will kill you with its icy grasp but more likely to bore you into oblivion.

For those who have seen any previous Sy-Fy creature feature flicks or if you’ve seen The Thing or any other polar-based horror film, Frost Giant will be all-too-familiar and all the script has done has work the elements of the two together. There’s the team of researchers at the polar station. An icy menace is unearthed. Cue lots of “there’s a snow storm coming so we can’t be evacuated” and “the temperature will drop to such and such degrees so we’ll all freeze to death” moments. Couple all of this with Sy-Fy’s ridiculous attempts to generate tension, the uber-low budget vibe that everything emits, one or two ‘named’ actors simply milling around for an easy pay day and the less-than-stellar CGI monster which never once looks like it exists in the same dimensional plane as the rest of the cast. With a structure that runs like clockwork, the only real danger in Frost Giant is just how repetitive everything gets. It's totally devoid of ideas and bankrupt of originality - switch out the alien for any other snow-based predator (a pair of Abominable Snowmen could have worked just as well) and you'd barely see the difference.

There’s little urgency. There’s little excitement. Nothing more than a series of identikit kills, the film just trudges through the snow from dull set piece to dull set piece. You get the impression at times that everyone was too cold to put any effort into the film, not least Dean Cain who must have fallen foul of some dodgy contract somewhere because he makes a habit of popping up in these tedious monster movies. There are some really over-exaggerated English accents in the film too most notably from English actor Steven Waddington who spouts off his scientific jargon with all of the verve of a Shakespearean thespian. Just because someone talks in a posh accent doesn’t make the dialogue any more sophisticated or intelligent. Waddington is a decent actor but this over-the-top approach makes him look daft. Between him and Cain, the two men try their best to make wine of water with the script but it’s just not to be. When characters appear dead-on-arrival thanks to the script, there’s nothing that can save them. A couple of character names in the shape of Cameron and Ridley are about as much creativity as the script can muster.

Even the introduction of a different monster to the usual crowd isn’t enough to rescue this frost-bitten flick from breaking apart. The ‘frost giant’ in question is hardly a giant and is little bigger than an ordinary man. Rendered with CGI, the monster is about as good or as poor as you’d expect it to look in something like this. Not a lot of thought has gone into creating it – the creature exists solely to live off heat so that it can return to its original form. There’s no other reason or logic behind it. Coupled with the CGI, the alien never once comes across as some sort of serious threat, just a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. Though not content with animating the alien with poor CGI, the effects team also see fit to give us CGI snow and a laughable climax involving a CGI digger.

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Final Verdict

Frost Giant is the type of film you’ll put on in the background and do something infinitely more exciting because even if you had the best intentions in the world and attentively sat down to watch, you’d still be drawn to doing other things, glancing up every so often whenever the monster killed someone. By-the-numbers nonsense which no doubt will be forgotten about once the next cookie-cutter Sy-Fy flick is made.

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Frost Giant Also Known As: Arctic Predator Director(s): Victor Garcia Writer(s): Rafael Jordan Actor(s): Dean Cain, Steven Waddington, Lucy Brown, Louisa Clein, Louis Johnson, Laia Gonzalez, Mike Johnson, Iliana Lzarova, Mike Straub Duration: 88 mins