Frozen, the new flick from the hilariously gruesome Adam Green, opens today, and if you can get to your local theater through the East Coast's snowstorm, we suggest you check it out. A ski resort horror story, Frozen centers on three friends who get trapped on a ski lift, and face an increasingly desperate set of choices to escape. We're guessing having the circulation in their legs cut off after sitting for so long is not the biggest of their problems.
But the idea of getting stuck someplace you'd rather not be made us think about quitting our jobs and going snowboarding all the great flicks featuring folks trapped in dire circumstances. For our 10 Favorite Trapped Movies, see below...
SAW (PT. 1)
DIRECTOR: James Wan
YEAR: 2004
TRAPPED IN: A torture room
• Two men awake to find themselves chained to pipes on opposite sides of a dirty industrial bathroom. With a dead body lying between them. We were once trapped in an elevator with a cute pizza delivery girl, but all she had was and anchovy and mushroom pie and panties with her name stitched on the waistband, not a revolver and a microcassette recorder. And she was alive, so there's that, too.
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PONTYPOOL
DIRECTOR: Bruce McDonald
YEAR: 2008
TRAPPED IN: A tiny podunk radio station
• The staff of a morning radio show discover a virus is overtaking their small town, only to learn it's spread by the English language itself! Would we sacrifice ourselves so Rush Limbaugh would die? How long do we have to think about it?
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THE MIST
DIRECTOR: Frank Darabont
YEAR: 2007
TRAPPED IN: A supermarket
• Adaptation of a classic Stephen King novella wherein the denizens of a small Maine town (N.B.: Why folks in small towns gotta get trapped all the time—they're not repressed enough?!) get trapped in a supermarket by a flock of human-eating wastoids that invaded their little 'burg during a thudnerstorm (hence the mist). Trapped in a supermarket?! Don't they know that obesity is the real killer these days!
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POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD
DIRECTOR: Lloyd Kaufman
YEAR: 2006
TRAPPED IN: A fast food restaurant
• A military-themed fast-food chicken joint builds a franchise on an ancient Indian burial ground, ruffling the feathers of the undead, who unleash a legion of zombie poultry, trapping employees and customers of said chicken joint on the premises. Leading Phineas Haverford of Hartford, CT who watched the flick with his wife Eleanor, to remark: "That's it. No more McNuggets for me. From now on, I'm eating only salmon, Ella."
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CUBE
DIRECTOR: Vincenzo Natali
YEAR: 1997
TRAPPED IN: A series of small rooms
• Seven strangers find themselves in a cubed room, with a door that gives way to another room, with another door that... Yeah, we feel kinda trapped just thinking about it.
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THE DESCENT
DIRECTOR: Neil Marshall
YEAR: 2005
TRAPPED IN: A cave
• You know it's trouble when a movie's about a caving expedition. Because they make tons of flicks about caving expeditions gone right.
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MISERY
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
YEAR: 1990
TRAPPED IN: A bed with an ugly ass woman
• An obsessed fan keeps a famous novelist hostage in her backwoods cabin. Why we've yet to finish our own book (among other reasons).
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[REC]
DIRECTOR: Jaume Balaguero
YEAR: 2007
TRAPPED IN: A small apartment complex
• A TV reporter and her cameraman cover a firehouse's night shift and get dragged into an outbreak of pseudo-zombie-ism at a local apartment building. Yes, 911 is a joke!
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THE SHINING
DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick
YEAR: 1980
TRAPPED IN: A luxury hotel by a snowstorm
• A classic in the "Trapped" genre, where a writer and his young family serve as off-season caretakers at a mountain resort, only to have the scribe go a bit off due to the isolation. We've often tried to arrange similar circumstances for the people who sit for our cats (scheduling vacations during snowstorms, leaving no food in the fridge and recipes for cat barbecue lying around, etc.), in an effort to get rid of those shitty little shits, but every time we come back there they are meowing and shitting under the bed. Again.
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THE RUINS
DIRECTOR: Carter Smith
YEAR: 2008
TRAPPED IN: An archaeological dig
• A group of friends get stuck in an ancient ruin after embarking on an archaeological tour while on vacation in Cancun. Stupid fuckers! The rules of Cancun: drink margaritas, not water, be careful of undercooked taco meat, and never, ever, ever go on bootleg archaeological tours!
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