Eighth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #18 Cold Prey

As a rule, I am not a big fan of the slasher genre of horror movies.  Other than the classics that started the whole thing (the original Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street and Black Christmas), I don't find them to be that good: group of kids, largely unlikable, get together for shenanigans; killer, whose past drove him to kill, starts picking them off one by one; I don't care because I don't care about any of these characters.  Cold Prey, a 2006 Norwegian slasher (a/k/a Fritt vilt), takes all the well-worn slasher tropes and does right by them.

A group of five sporty, young, attractive Norwegians - Jannicke and Eirik, Ingunn and Mikal, and fifth-wheel Morten - head off into the back country for some crowd-free snowboarding.  It is all going swimmingly until Morten takes a hard fall and breaks his leg badly.  Jannicke proves quite capable and resets his leg; the group then takes shelter in an abandoned ski resort.  The place looks to have closed in the mid 1970s and a closer look at the hotel guest book shows that someone's child was lost, leading to the closure.  After Jannicke disinfects Morten's wound and seals it shut with crazy-glue, the kids build a fire, manage to get the generator running again and make the best of it.  As night falls, Ingunn and Mikal find an empty hotel room (Room 237, in a shout-out to The Shining) and that's when things start to go bad.  The killer starts picking them off, one by one.  It is bloody but not horrifically so.  The killer is brutal but not inhumanly so.  And the kids act like normal human beings would when placed in this terrifying position.

I thought Cold Prey was fantastic.  The "slutty girl" was not, in fact, slutty.  The "annoying sidekick guy" was neither annoying nor treated like a sidekick.  Although there wasn't deep characterization for anyone, I actually liked these kids and so cared when the killer was after them - Jannicke, the kickass Final Girl, is smart, kind, thoughtful and believable.  There is a sequel, Cold Prey 2, which apparently picks right up where this one leaves off and, by expert accounts, is even better than this first one.  I'm going to have to re-think my stance on slashers if this keeps up.