Nice effects though.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

At the start of the millennium, exploitation movies were few and far between. Films such as I Spit On Your Grave, The Last House On The Left and The Virgin Spring had left the subgenre with little room to breathe. Unsurprising then, that Takashi Ishii briefly moved away from the exploitation genre that dominated his early works and directed Gonin, making him an international name. His films have always been largely preoccupied with revenge, and Freezer was to be no exception. Whereas Irreversible, released two years later, drew critical acclaim mainly for not glorifying the life that had been destroyed but to mourn it, Freezer was first to shift the focus from gory revenge and concentrate on the victim as she struggled to cope with the memories she thought she had buried deep inside her. Irreversible may be more celebrated, but Freezer also demands your attention. Without ever glorifying the horrific acts that fuel Chirhiro's bloody vengeance, Freezer is, for the most part, well-paced and surprisingly beautiful, with a compelling and intensely dramatic performance from its lead. DW

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.

It is an odd fact that most woman who are raped do not report the crime. In fact some feel ashamed and embarrassed by the act of violence against them. This is one reason why rape is very different than robbery, assault or many other crimes. Many more issues and emotions come into play on a rape than other crimes. Takashi Ishii explores society's reaction to woman who are raped in a powerful, but truthful way in "Freeze Me".SUMMARY ****MINOR SPOILERS*****Chihiro was raped by men from her home town and videotaped. 5 years later we see her making a new life in Tokyo. She has a good job, good friends, and a great fiancee', but Chihiro has told no one of her past. Very early we see that the Japan that she inhabits looks down at woman having sex before marriage. This is seen through a conversation between Chihiro, her fiancee' and some of their friends. When they admit they have made love already their friends think it is scandalous.Suddenly one day when she is in her apartment lobby she sees one of the men who raped her. He treats her like an old friend, but she is horrified and scared. He forces his way up to her apartment and tells her that soon there will be a reunion at her place, with her old "friends". Obviously Chihiro is afraid of being raped again and she is. Before all the others show up the man forces himself on her. What is odd is that he then starts to live with her, forcing her to do what he says threatening to tell everyone of her past and show pictures from the video of the rape. It is difficult to understand why she is so embarressed to call the police when she was the victim, not a willing participant. Why will her friends think she is a whore and disassociate themselves from her when she was raped?. Is Japanese society's view on women so skewed that these actions are accurate or is Takashi Ishii's Japan an exaggerated look at the world? I do not have the answer to this and became the most difficult part of the film to understand. It is holding me back from saying this is one of Japan's best contemporary films because i am not sure if this kind of set up is logical or not.Soon Chihiro can not take the abuse anymore and because no one will help her (the man told her fiancee' about the rape and he abandoned her out of shame) she lashes out at her victimizer. One by one the men show up at her apartment and one by one she has her revenge.END OF SUMMARY*****Women taking matters into their own hands because society will not help them is the central theme in "Freeze Me". Ishii explores this by setting most of the action in Chihiro's apartment creating a small world inwhich the outside will not help her. The best of Contemporary Japanese genre films take basic exploitation plots and use them to showcase higher ideas. They elavate exploitation, but are still able to deliver the visceral thrills that make exploitation enjoyable (i.e Battle Royale, Audition). "Freeze Me" does this well. Rape is a hard subject to tackle and not everyone will agree with me that Ishii handled it with respect and seriousness. Many still may think it is a standard Rape/Revenge flick that has been done so many times before. I say their is to much subtext to write "Freeze Me" off as simple mindless vulgarity. The film is brutal and disturbing, but Ishii does not take pleasure in the rape or he does not show Chihiro as a "good guy" when she takes revenge. This move might sicken you and you may feel dirty after watching it, but hopefully it will also make you think about how woman seen in our world and the value we put on them.

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.