Cold Prey III didn't have much hope for this title with it's generic cover and tag line of " She thought her nightmare was over... She was wrong!", but it turned out to be a well directed instant horror classic with a nice feminine hero in Jannicke. Did I mention it's from Norway, subtitled and isn't dubbed? The cover though, could you be more generic? It's okay to pay someone a little to do a nice cover for you work, so Photoshopped it's sad.
Norwegians have been making some very good films over the last few years and been met with high acclaim here in the states. Cold Prey 2 is worthy of that praise too with it's own insane psycho shambling about killing people and female hero to take him down. Taking place right after Cold Prey 1, which I haven't seen, we find Jannicke lost in the snow. Her friends were axed on a vacation trip in the previous film by strange wilderness man with a pickaxe at his creepy hotel. Lesson: Don't go to creepy hotels. Jannicke, her friends bodies and the corpse of the fiend that killed them all end up at the same hospital. Sadly, for Jannicke the doctors bring back her murdering hobo woodsman out of stupidity and tie her up too for good measure. Now she must struggle to survive in a hospital with a crazed lunatic whose picking off the staff one by one.
This hospital is closing so not many pickings for a murdering hobo friend, we get some good kills here and their and it makes it less of a kill fest and more of a frightening, suspenseful affair.
The film succeeds as a perfect psycho horror movie with steady pacing, grizzly murders and
Jannicke coming to terms being a fighter. She grows stronger and is the smartest person or only sane person with how to deal with the murderer. When people do get wise it's to late for them.
One little gimmick grabbed me, after a motorist almost fatally runs over our heroine, who was just standing in the middle of nowhere, the camera looks into the driver's side mirror just getting her all alone and by herself. Such a beautiful shot. Then there's a touching scene where our heroine goes over her friends dead bodies in the hospital morgue until she ends up on their murderer's recovered body and keeps hitting until she restrained. The scream covered by the electric hand thing superb.
-There's even use of a Nintendo DS, one of my favorite cameo products in movies.
There's just so many great moments and with probably not the biggest budget it shames so many direct to DVD horror films in America and even some that have made it to the box office. I hope to see more from director Mats Stenberg, but this film came out in 2008 and haven't seen anything else up on Amazon. It does make me look forward to any Norwegian Film Festival in LA or at least more films from that country coming here.
The DVD was provided by the publisher for review
