Furîzu mî

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.

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...

I watched this movie with no knowledge of what the story was about. The director did a very good job developing suspense right from the start. When I found out about the plight of Chihiro, I automatically felt for her. Because of what happened, its effect is so traumatizing that she's virtually helpless to do anything. When push comes to shove, Chihiro has the "fight or flight" choice and it's interesting to see what choice she makes. I must commend Harumi Inoue who gave a really great performance. She truly displayed fear, confusion, paranoia well and I felt really concerned for her character. Hey, if a movie made me feel that strong, I think it got it successfully got its message across.

"Freeze Me" depicts intense violence and I don't mean like cheesy Hollywood does. It deals with violence against women which sadly is not fictional in society. The story takes a trippy twist towards the end and watch the character progression thoughout the film. I must say that Harumi Inoue is stunningly beautiful and was great to watch. She's definitely got a new fan!

A thoroughly disturbing film, where the seemingly normality of a working woman's life is blown apart by the arrival of a man from her past. I liked the changes of direction that were made in the story. The beginning shows a perfectly normal group of workers, in a situation that seems perfectly plausible, indeed the acting here is so relaxed and natural. However, with the arrival of a man comes the first turn, and we see the dark secret that has been kept for so long, and this is where the disturbing feelings arrive with a violent crash. As the other members of a yakuza gang rape arrive, five years after the incident, they bring ever escalating levels of violence to the woman's life, and as the ties to her new normal life begin to break away, so do her ties to sanity. There comes the next turn, and her shocking actions. However, being shocking and disturbing does not a good film make, and I felt that it was this turn in direction that started a downward trip for the movie. Having started with a story that felt so real and human, this turn pulled in a totally different direction building a huge gulf between story and my beliefs and sympathies. I felt myself wishing that the story had remained in the vein of the first half, I am sure that it would have made a better film overall. Still, it's not a total loss.

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.