Review: ‘Cold Prey II’

It’s nice to see that even foreign filmgoers have to contend with sequel-itis.  2006’s ‘Cold Prey’ (‘Fritt Vilt’) was a fairly standard slasher movie structure-wise.  A group of snowboarders must take refuge in an abandoned hotel.  Killer resident of said hotel takes them out one-by-one.  But there was a style and a level of depth to ‘Cold Prey,’ something that is missing for the majority of its sequel.  ‘Cold Prey II,’ much like its predecessor, is a fairly standard slasher movie, too.  Its setting has changed, there is a little more backstory to the killer involved, the body count is higher, and the characters being picked off are paper thin.  You know, your basic rules of a slasher movie sequel.

Taking a page from ‘Halloween II,’ ‘Cold Prey II’ starts up right where the last film has left off.  Jannicke, once again played by the tough Ingrid Bolso Berdal, has just stabbed the killer with his own pickaxe and dropped him down the deep crevasse where he dumps his victims.  She has been found, taken to a local hospital, and police are investigating.  The bodies of her friends, and that of the killer, are brought to the morgue in the basement of the hospital.  The hospital, as horror conventions would have it, is in its final days, so the crew is thin, and only a few patients are on hand.  You pretty much know where things are going to go.

‘Cold Prey II’ works well for the first half, taking its time in building the tension at the hospital.  Some of the hospital workers have a certain level of story built up around them, as do some of the local policemen who are investigating.  You honestly don’t know where the threat is going to come from.  Will Jannicke go insane and start taking people out?  Will the killer, believed dead, rise up and start in again?  Will another menace come out of the crevasse where a few policemen are still conducting an investigation?  In this, returning screenwriter Thomas Moldestad does a good job baiting his audience and keeping us waiting for the lights to go out and the suspense to kick in.  It’s not until the 30-minute mark that things begin to go awry, but, once they do, it’s pretty nonstop.

Of course, there are issues with Moldestad’s screenplay.  Serious issues.  With ‘Cold Prey,’ he was dealing with a small group of characters who pretty much did everything as you should in real life.  They were just in a situation that was so extraordinary that they couldn’t handle it.  When a killer was stalking them, they bolted themselves into a room, sat, and waited.  With ‘Cold Prey II,’ he has to contend with a much larger cast, and some of the characters are pretty expendable, and even more of them are pretty stupid.

If there’s a killer walking the hallways of your hospital, why don’t you take up a weapon from the conveniently placed trashcan of weapons near the front desk?  Why don’t you hide that trashcan, too, so the killer has a worse off chance of finding them?  If you know there’s something wrong, the lights have gone out, the emergency lights have not kicked in, and you are fully aware there’s a living, breathing killer in your hospital, how about you don’t spend ten minutes working on the generator in the dark basement?  How about you leave the hospital and wait for the cops to come back?  If you’re in a car and the windows are all frozen over, how about you don’t just sit there?  Get out of the car where you can see someone coming from a mile away.

These are just a few of the stupid traits people in horror movies seem to have to display in order for suspense and plot to move forward, and, with ‘Cold Prey,’ Moldestad didn’t have to worry about all of that.  He was dealing with, at most, five characters at any one time.  With ‘Cold Prey II,’ he gets in over his head, and the level of horror movie routine found here is astounding.

First-time director, Mats Stenberg, does a decent job keeping the pace up once the action kicks in.  He and Moldestad work out a nice movement between the ongoing storylines at the hospital and the chief of police who is looking into the background of the hotel and its owners.  That subplot brings up a nice backstory to the killer, one that opens up the doorway for the ‘Cold Prey’ franchise to continue on a la ‘Friday the 13th.’  Stenberg does his best at holding up the style found in Roar Uthaug’s direction from the first, even though it’s never quite to that level.

Leading up to the final act, ‘Cold Prey II’ is hit or miss.  A few moments offer up some nice scares, a nice bit of gore, and a pretty nonstop level of intensity despite how slipshod the characters involved are written.  Unfortunately, the movie completely loses its grip in the third act.  It’s rushed, it’s never intense in any way, and it involves that age-old movie element where someone arrives just in time to save someone else from being killed by the bad guy.  It’s stereotypical of the genre, and there are so many, better ways to work out a situation than resort back to what’s been done time and time again.  The movie ends on a final note, one that you know isn’t going to hold up once ‘Cold Prey III’ decides to get rolling, and it leaves the audience not necessarily wanting more but better.

Unfortunately, foreign films, particularly horror, while still better than most of the trash that is released by American studios, is becoming more and more typical.  Even though it was stylistically top-notch, intelligent (well, more intelligent than the norm, anyway), and suspenseful, ‘Cold Prey’ was still just another slasher movie.  ‘Cold Prey II’ keeps the style and intensity, but it completely jettisons the intelligence.  It ends up being something you trust in foreign filmmakers to avoid completely, entirely average.