Sometimes, life can be tough for a Wes Craven completist. You see, while we love the dear, departed director, for every genre defining film in his arsenal, he’s got a skeleton lurking in the closet ready to tumble out at the opportune moment to break that iconic streak. That’s not to say that the man didn’t deserve that weighty legacy, after all, it’s not everyone who has films like Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Scream proudly adorning their filmographies – but for every era-defining triumph, there’s an iffy TV movie or a bungled blockbuster waiting in the wings to derail things.
Prime on this list is Chiller, a made for television outing that graced screens after Craven hit big with A Nightmare On Elm Street, but chances are, if the director’s name hadn’t been emblazoned all over the advertising, chances are you wouldn’t even suspect that the man that gave us Freddy Krueger also turned in this serving of warmed over crap.
After succumbing to a illness ten years earlier, Miles Creighton has been literally on ice once he was placed in cryogenic storage until the means to revive and heal him become common place. However, when a malfunction of his freezer means that he rapidly starts thawing, he’s rushed to the nearest (classiest) hospital in order to save his life. After a struggle in surgery and a realisation that his long standing illness can now be cured, Miles recovers in a coma as his wealthy, clingy mother, Marion, wrings her hands in worry.
Of course, due to a menacing subtlety-free score everything the camera lingers on the slumbering Miles and the fact that the film keeps dropping in random jump scares to keep us awake, there’s obviously something sinister going on.
Once Miles finally wakes, we find out exactly what that is. It seems that even though his life has been returned to him after a decade on ice, his soul has chosen to sit his resurrection out leaving him an amoral, cold, sociopath with no regard for such things as kindness or empathy. However, because he’s been put at the head of his father’s company, no one notices that his harsh business decisions are a result of being pure evil and not just an aggressive dick. But beyond drilling the company into the ground, he starts callously trimming the fat, firing friends of the family and arranging opportunistic “accidents” to keep his path clear.
But while Marion is in a state of denial about the fact that her baby boy has gone off the deep end, the rather alarming stares Miles has been giving his painfully innocent step-sister is certainly cause for concern. Will Marion finally get with the programme and recognised that her spawn has turned like bad milk, or will the steadily rising pile of bodies help her finally cut those apron strings?
While the main hook of Chiller revolves around the practice of cryogenic freezing, you get the feeling that maybe one of those icy pipes may have been leaking freon onto the set, because every aspect of the flick feels like it’s freezing to a halt faster than the T-1000 after a bath in liquid nitrogen. The script, the pace, the acting and the scares in this movie all seem like their joints are rapidly getting gummed up with icicles as it slowly lurches through it’s paces without even trying to pick up any speed. While I’m a little foggy on the exact timeline of when it was filmed in relation to when Elm Street was shot and released, the fact that these two movies are sat next to each other in Craven’s filmography leaves a little cause for concern. While the movie that introduced us to Wes’ wildly popular, razor gloved dream demon is slick, fast and loaded with juicy psychological depth, in comparison Chiller is utterly devoid of life, staggeringly boring and has little to say other than the on the nose observation that owners of big corporations can be amoral dickheads.
While Craven’s gifts may not be readily apparent here, at least there’s the old familiar face to get things moving. As the entitled, refrigerated rich kid turned remorseless monster, we find The Warriors’ Michael Beck who manages to avoid accusations of emoting less than a block of ice thanks to the fact that he’s supposed to be an emotionless husk.
Elsewhere, Poltergeist’s Beatrice Straight gets to spend most of the film dramatically declaring “not my son” even when it’s getting pretty obvious that her son is triggering heart attacks and abusing women without a second thought and we even get Paul Sorvino as a priest who suspects that they need to talk about Miles. However, despite containing some seasoned performers, Craven can’t seem to get them invested in the hokey material enough to do more than just phone this stuff in. To be fair, I I had to deliver such leaden exposition and try and infuse it with life, I’d probably bring my B game too and at times, I was hoping that some cryogenic facilities were available so I could freeze myself until the end of the film, lack of soul be damned.
If it feels like I’m being a bit too hard on this extraordinarily bland film, you have to remember that not only was Chiller (possibly Craven’s worst) released disconcertingly close to Elm Street (arguably Craven’s best), but in this isn’t even the director’s first forray into the frustratingly restrained world of crappy, made for TV movies. But while entries like the melodramatic witchsploitation flick, Stranger In Our House and the Satanic conspiracy film Invitation To Hell certainly don’t do the director justice either, at least they contain moments of unintentional hilarity such as the former ending with the crazed witch taking part in a car chase and latter having one of the most tacked on jump scare endings of the entire decade. Christ, even the creaky Swamp Thing offered up rubbery monster costumes and the risiable Hill Have Eyes II gave us fucking dog flashbacks for us to puzzle and chuckle over; in comparison Chiller gives us virtually nothing to have fun with either good or bad and instantly evaporates from the memory as you’re watching it.
Seemingly unable to stir up any enthusiasm for it’s painfully obvious “wealthy equals evil” themes, Chiller literally doesn’t have anything else to add. The kills are weak, the villain is one dimensional, any tension is absent without leave and none of the other members of the cast seem that bothered about making any sort if impact whatsoever. Speaking as someone who loves Craven, even I have to admit: Chiller went and left me completely cold. And I’m not even going to apologise for the joke, either.
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