Tuesday, March 10, 2009

In short: Cold Prey 2 (2008)

After surviving her fight against the cold-loving slasher in the first Cold Prey, final girl Jannicke (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) is picked up by a patrolling police man. Looks like the first part didn't take place as far from civilization as we were told, huh, or is it possible that someone scripting this was incredibly lazy?

Be that as it may, Norwegian police is endlessly competent. After they have shipped Jannicke to the next hospital (yeah, the hospital is bound to be closed very soon and run by a small emergency team - how ever did you guess that?), it only takes them a few hours to recover the dead bodies from the last movie - including The Killer, of course. They ship them to the hospital, too, of course.

As it goes with killers in slasher movies, the big hairy one isn't as dead as everyone thinks he is (of course) and soon wakes up to dismember a few more people. What a nice coincidence that there's a professional final girl in the hospital.

Well, I can't say Cold Prey 2 isn't competently made. The film has no technical problems to speak of, the actors are professional enough, there's not even a stray microphone arm in sight. But what use is competence when it's the best there is to say about a film. Everything that could be the base of an entertaining film is completely undermined by an incredible predictability and a derivativeness in search of a fitting superlative (even "more derivative than slashers usually are" comes to mind, but is rejected as making the film sound too original).

There's not a single moment you haven't seen played out in exactly the same way in a dozen other movies, not a single scene that's playing out differently than you'd expect - the film is nearly brilliant in its absolute lack of even a single second of footage that doesn't look like it was taken directly from the outtakes of other films of the sub genre.

I'd also like to mention how gloriously wrongheaded the final confrontation is. Not a single reason comes to mind why it should take place at all, no, sorry, let's make that "not a single good reason" - Cold Prey 2 would be just too short for a feature film without it.

I'd really like to recommend this to anyone, but friends of the slasher movie will have seen all parts of the film already - before those parts were senselessly stitched together to form this Frankensteinian abomination - and people new to the subgenre should probably start out with something that's actually any good, or at least vaguely entertaining.

 

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