Freezer (4 Stars)

This is my Halloween Challenge film #13. It's also been called "Freeze me" in some countries, presumably because the title "Freezer" has been used for various films over the years.

I have a question for my readers. When you kill someone, how do you get rid of the body? If you kill someone in the woods you can leave the body where it is, but what if you kill someone in your own apartment? In "The Sopranos" they used a butcher's shop to chop up bodies into small pieces. In "Snatch" the London gangster Brick Top uses pigs to eat dead bodies. In "Cold Fish" the gangster owns a crematorium, which is probably the most efficient way to dispose of a body. None of those opportunities are available to me. If I had a dead body in my apartment, a man who weighs 200 pounds, I wouldn't even be able to carry him down the stairs to put him in my car. That's enough to put anyone off killing.

This is the dilemma faced by Chihiro in "Freezer". When she was in her last year of school she was raped by three gang members who broke into her home. She didn't go to the police. Supposedly that happens a lot. Women are so traumatised by being raped that they don't want to have to talk about it for months in courtroom arguments, where the men will probably try to persuade the jury that the woman was a willing slut. Women prefer to forget. That's sad but true. The problem is, if a woman doesn't go to the police the rapists are convinced that the woman was willing. It's a twisted fantasy in the heads of many men that women want to be controlled, so they want to be raped.

Five years later Chihiro has moved on. She's working in a bank in Tokyo and she's engaged to marry one of her colleagues. She's never told anyone about what happened, but the past catches up with her. The three rapists decide to visit her. They think of her as an old friend, misinterpreting her silence as willingness. They arrive one by one over a period of four days. One by one she kills them. But what can she do with the bodies?

Chihiro does the best she can with what's available to her. She puts the body of the first man in her freezer. When she kills the second man she buys another freezer. Then she buys a third freezer. The freezers are soon cluttering up her small apartment.

As I've heard from several sources, killing changes you. It doesn't matter if you're a murderer or a soldier who kills legally, killing your first person changes you forever. The change is even more dramatic in the case of Chihiro who has killed three men in four days. She can't stop. She has to kill more. In a way it's understandable. Killing someone gives you a feeling of power, especially if you're a weak woman killing a strong man. The problem is that Chihiro needs more and more freezers.

Like all good horror/thriller crossover films, "Freezer" is at the same time horrifying and fascinating. It gives an insight into the steady progression of madness in a woman who has suffered the most terrible of all crimes.

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