Day 2: Snow Falls

Day 2 of Calloween Movie Month

Recommended?: No.

Content warnings: Self-harm, fairly minor blood and gore, unreality, cancer

Spoilers abound and discussion of any and all previously warned about content below this point.

Where I live it's not uncommon for it to snow all through out October. In my childhood, I even spent a Halloween unable to trick or treat because it was snowing all night. So the idea of being stuck inside while god throws snow at me isn't foreign, even while I'm supposed to be enjoying pleasantly chilly sweater weather. Because of this, Snow Falls, a movie about five friends who are tragically snowed in on what should've been a fun holiday retreat, seemed like a perfect fit to watch today.

It's a fittingly sub-zero cold take when I tell you that this movie is bad, and I'm probably not treading any new ground in this review. The CG effects are laughably bad. The entire thing is pretty boring. The plot is unoriginal and bland. The cinematography is completely static. The characters are paper thin outside of their 2 personality traits each despite their actors' best efforts. And, the characters are notably stupid.

I'm not usually overtly critical of characters' actions in horror movies. There's a lot of reasons that somebody might not be at their peak of intelligence. Fear is a big one, as most people aren't great at thinking under pressure. But also consider many characters in horror in general but especially slashers, which is the horror subgenre this critique is most prevalent in, are teenagers. Not to mention that a lot of the people who talk about this seem to be under the impression that fictional characters not thinking the way they themselves might means that they're making stupid decisions. My point is, it's usually a pretty shallow and poorly reasoned criticism that doesn't serve to actually critique film writing but to make the people making said criticism look smarter.

The cast in this movie have an IQ lower than the temperature outside of their cabin.

They're warned multiple times that a pretty nasty blizzard is coming their way yet choose to stay in their rich boy friend's isolated log cabin. The med student says they shouldn't eat what they have because most of it is sweets and states the untrue notion that they'll have a sugar crash and succumb to hypothermia. And most notably, one of them rightfully suggests that they should use some of the wooden furniture the cabin is covered with after they run out of firewood, to which the rich boy says he can't do because his mom will be mad. They bring it up again later only to end up having one character DIE because the rich boy gets into a confrontation with him over trying to chop up an antique table. It's truly baffling watching these grown ass adults act like children. Hell, there's even a scene where the med student character finds out the rich boy has been hoarding the snacks, what little food they have left, and refers to it as if it's a secret stash of drugs. So I'm not entirely convinced they aren't actually overgrown children. Which would at least make it a little more interesting to sit through.

I wasn't under the impression that it would be good in any kind of traditional sense, but I thought it'd at least be funny-bad. Unfortunately it mostly fails to deliver on that front.

There are a few moments that made me laugh. When the med student brings up the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta up unprompted and treats it like it's completely real, when one of the characters hallucinates their previously built snowman attempting to break the window with it's dopey looking carrot nose, when they theorize that the snow they made alcoholic snow cones with was "contaminated" somehow and the movie expects me to take it seriously as a genuine possible explanation for the group's shared hysteria, one of the character's hallucinating their friend calling them on their phone only for him to say he's cold and the phone screen to be covered by what looks like a lame TikTok filter. There's also an extremely accidentally funny running theme where the med student will bring up her dead mom at literally any time that she can. But these moments, while highlights, are few and far between enough to where I couldn't recommend it even to people looking for a fun time laughing at a bad movie. Most of it is just boring, sterile and dumb.

I will give credit to one scene for being almost creepy. Where one of the characters slices open her stomach and quietly says "I think I got it out." However it's undercut by the context of "it" being evil snow.

I would look somewhere else this Halloween season if your tastes skew more towards the B grade of horror cinema.