The Chill Factor

 

To finish off this frozen duology, I decided to dive into another snow themed slasher from yesteryear titled The Chill Factor. When I was starting to reach the edge of not wanting to collect physical copies of horror films anymore, this was one of the last ones I was interested in purchasing considering that Arrow Video had put this into print on blu-ray, it looked like a cool addition (pun intended) to hang out amongst the rest of what I had already accumulated at that point. In the same vain as being a fan of more obscure sub-genres of horror such as SOV and spa/workout horror and heavy metal horror, I also really like this less traversed hallway in the corridors of terror-snow or winter centered fright films. I don't what it is-maybe it's the whole aesthetic of everything being isolated because of the massive amounts of snow everywhere, or just the bitter cold you can feel coming off the screen as our main characters fumble around while getting annihilated, but there's something special hidden in the DNA here for me whenever I sit down to watch an entry in this arm that not a lot of horror fans seem to gravitate towards. When it comes to The Chill Factor in particular, there isn't anything that special about it as an individual film-but once it's sitting amongst it's peers like Iced, Shredder, Dead Snow and anything else in this ilk-it's a pretty solid and fun entry to jab your icicle into. If you want a basic breakdown, it's pretty much a mix of The Evil Dead, The Exorcist and, well-Iced. Yeah. So pretty much what takes place in The Chill Factor is that a group of friends are really into motorized sledding to the point where that's their only mode of transportation to get anywhere. They end up at some local bar in the middle of iced-over nowhere, and right when the film starts we are presented with some racist redneck bullshit that hates one of our main guys' fiancée's because she's black and he's white. Really, who even gives a shit about that. But I guess back in 1993 it was still a thing to hate people with different colored skin. I'm pretty much on the same level with remembering all the characters names as I was when I was watching Iced, so all I'm going to do is be as generic as possible to get the story across. Or come up with my own names. After the black girl fiancée gets made fun of for a second just because she has a darker skin pigment, her male fiancée comes around, says some shit to this dumbass about how he was just drafted to the Minnesota Vikings, and proceeds to dispose of the loser quickly. They all sit down to have some beers because it's another one of the guys' birthday in the group, and the main woman that runs the place starts telling them about Black Friar Lake. It's sad when I remember the name of the lake more than the names of the main characters. The birthday boy and Tom (I only remember his name because of certain events that I'll get to soon) decide after a lot of drinking that it's a good idea to race across this frozen over Black Friar Lake to see who's sled is faster. Of course, the race ends up being a disaster because Tom goes flying head first into a tree and the birthday boy just falls off his at some point. Minnesota Viking and one of the ladies in the group find some abandoned religious camp ground that's all boarded up, and break into it for warmth and to try and get some medical help for Tommy Boy. One by one they become unalived in various ways-especially after they find this ridiculous, oversized, hand-made Ouija board with what looks like a human eyeball in the middle of it where the spinner is anchored. They do a shitty séance, a dark spirit that was trapped there takes over Tommy's body, he miraculously heals, has sex with all but one or two of the girls in the group (the black girl is dead by this point) and it turns from a fun, half anxiety filled urgency for Tommy's health into a possession based Exorcist type deal with a finale that I honestly wasn't fully expecting. I'm going to ramp it up zits and zombies and say that I think that if you even remotely have any interest in frost layered terror, give The Chill Factor a shot. It doesn't matter if you bought a new designer winter jacket or a motorized sled or any of that crap-it only matters if you know how to have fun and are in the mood for winterized devil worship and seeing a black woman's head being brutalized by a ceiling fan. That happens here. Factor in some chills-before winter is over.