FrightFest review – Cold Meat

FrightFest review – Cold Meat

David (Allen Leech) is driving through snowy Colorado just as bad weather takes a turn for the much worse.  He stops off in a diner just as waitress Ana (Nina Bergman) is being hassled by her violent ex-husband Vincent (Yan Tual) and speaks up – which may not be the best idea.  Later, driving on, David is pursued by Vincent – who naturally has a bigger, badder truck — and takes evasive action which lands the car in a snowdrift and him with a broken leg from an ill-advised attempt to get away on foot.  No cell phone reception, as usual in horror movies.  And there was an opening narration which didn’t namecheck Larry Fessenden’s favourite backwoods demon the wendigo but all but declared the antlered flesh-eater would show up eventually – in dreams, metaphorically as a roving serial killer, or full-on monster movie reality.

Directed by Sébastien Drouin, who also co-wrote with James Kermack and Andrew Desmond, Cold Meat is a trapped-in-hostile-territory movie which also overlaps with the two-people-in-a-car ordeal sub-genre repped this FrightFest by Sympathy for the Devil … since David is, for the most part, joined by a nemesis in a shifting game of who’s-in-charge as neither party wants to be around the other but circumstances mean they both have to be in the snowbound car and even overcome mutual distaste to huddle for body heat.  The central section gets a bit chatty, but performances are strong enough to sell the back-and-forth – and Drouin manages an impressive, intimidating sense of a cruel landscape possibly haunted by monsters.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.