Fooling the audience to good effect, DEAD COLD chills at just the right temperature; with its menage-a-trois twist, direct-to-vid viewers don't have to feel as if they're struggling to climb out of a snowdrift of obviousness.
After recuperating from a near-fatal car-jacking, screenwriter Eric Thornsen (Chris Mulkey) bundles up his supportive wife Alicia (Lysette Anthony) for a remote spot where he can forget urban anxiety and complete his novel. The rustic calm of this second honeymoon is marred by the appearance of a
homicidal fugitive, Kale (Peter Dobson), also responsible for the car-jacking. Kale has warmed up for terrorizing the Thornsens by shooting Sarah (Alina Thompson), the daughter of local tourist cabin manager Bill Butler (Michael Champion). When Eric finds a frostbitten Kale on his doorstep, the
good Samaritan takes in the viper despite Alicia's overstated wariness. Irredeemably vulgar, Kale proves to be a trying houseguest whose stay is prolonged by the inexplicable conk-out of Eric's auto. Failing to fully comprehend what he's up against, Eric is goaded into an evening of boozing which
climaxes in Kale incapacitating him and dumping his body down a ravine. Returning to ravage the wife, Kale gets a warm reception from the spidery Alicia...for whom this is the second attempt on her unsuspecting hubby's life. While the lethal lovebirds count their insurance payments before they're
hatched, hypothermic Eric trudges slowly cabin-ward. Putting two and two together while looking for his missing daughter, Bill Butler employs an accusatory tone that nets him a pitchforked response from Kale. When Eric stumbles back, after discovering Sarah's corpse, he's prepared to confront his
wily mate, who improvises by fatally shooting Kale to cover her guilt. But wised up to his would-be widow, Eric defends himself from a vicious assault that builds up to Alicia's fatally falling onto an ax jutting from a tree stump below.
If only this sly escapade's middle section didn't sag like a mid-life gut, this otherwise trim film noir might have been a model tale of triangular betrayal. Despite the complacent crosscutting between shivering Eric and the bickering spouse-exterminators before the climax, the movie must be
saluted for its devious set-up and dazzling pay-off. By slyly beginning the film with Eric laying out a fictitious murder scenario for a script, DEAD COLD freezes the viewer into Eric's perspective and engages sympathy while establishing the gullibility that makes him a patsy for a doxy like
Alicia. In the vein of KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) and DEAD CALM (1989), the shifting loyalties inside that cramped cabin bristle with bottled-up erotic tension; this type of thriller suggests that only in close quarters are people unable to disguise their true colors. Perhaps the revelation about
Kale and Alicia's teamwork should have been postponed; as it stands, DEAD COLD does drop the ball once we realize Alicia is a belle dame sans merci. But DEAD COLD is a reasonably gripping suspense package that often maxes thrills from its isolated setting. (Extreme profanity, extensive nudity,
graphic violence, adult situations, substance abuse, sexual situations.) leave a comment
