Snow Falls
With more plowing “Snow Falls” could’ve avoided blowing.
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If you’ve ever longed for a largely bloodless, sexless and toothless wintry twist on Eli Roth’s “Cabin Fever,” then “Snow Falls” (now available on VOD) may just be the flick for you. This horror-thriller edited and directed by Colton Tran, who also co-stars and received story credit alongside executive producer Laura M. Young, doesn’t accumulate to a whole heckuva lot.
Five friends are celebrating New Year’s Eve at a remote chalet. River (Johnny Berchtold of last week’s Netflix pupper picture “Dog Gone”) is protective of the property belonging to his Dad (Patrick Fabian – probably best remembered for “Better Call Saul,” but he’ll always be Professor Jeremiah Lasky from “Saved by the Bell: The College Years” in my heart). Eden (Anna Grace Barlow, the upcoming “Jesus Revolution”), on whom River has a crush, is a medical student who recently lost her mother. Em (Victoria Moroles, “Blood Relatives”) is a hypochondriac who’s doted upon by her loving boyfriend Andy (James Gaisford). Last but not least there’s Kit (Tran), the freewheeling wild card of the group.
As the gang gets more and more blotto, a blizzard strikes the cabin and surrounding areas. What’s fun at first (the kids consume boozy snow cones – don’t eat the yellow ones!) quickly becomes frightening (the chalet loses power including most importantly heat). The friends surmise that they can’t possibly drive in these conditions … for the record they definitely could … so they stay put. Cell phones are rendered useless as no one gets signal. Even as their firewood is dwindling, River refuses to offer up his mother’s antiques as kindling. Hypothermia among the homies leads to groupthink mania.
Tran’s Kit makes reference to natural selection during the film’s opening, which serves as obvious foreshadowing to how everything plays out. These are some of the dumbest characters (save for maybe Barlow’s Eden) I’ve encountered in recent movie memory. As scripted by Luke Genton, this is the Darwin Awards filtered through the horror genre. The actors do as much with the material as they can (the gals fare better than the guys), but these folks aren’t likable and their demises didn’t move me one way or another.
To Tran’s credit some of his trippy imagery pays dividends (there’s a hallucination of a snowman becoming sentient, which calls to mind “Jack Frost” – not the Michael Keaton vehicle, but rather the one in which the snowman removes his carrot schnoz and turns it into his carrot shvantz).
The effects depicting the snowstorm alternate between convincing and comical, which leads to some unintended laughs. This seems like some California beach bum’s conception of what a blizzard is. These creatives’ knowledge of Blizzards likely involves frozen custard, candy and a spoon. (I get it – as a little kid in Athens, Ga. folks would go into DEFCON 3 and raid the Piggly Wiggly at the slightest sniff of snow.)
The long and short of it is this – and I know I’m playing the part of dirty dude here – with more plowing “Snow Falls” could’ve avoided blowing.