Freeze Me (2000)

Admirable film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Beautiful schoolgirl Chihiro (played by stunning Japanese model Harumi Inoue) is raped by three young Yakuza hoodlums with the whole assault recorded by the thugs on video. Both ashamed and frightened, Chihiro moves to Tokyo to try and forget her past and build a new life for herself. However, her plans are scuppered when the three rapists track her down one by one and force themselves into her apartment. Pushed to her limits, Chihiro fights back, killing her assailants and stuffing their bodies into freezers.Directed by Takashi Ishii, Freeze Me is a brutal, nihilistic rape revenge film that, despite my plot summary, doesn't feel quite as sleazy as it sounds. Whilst the film does revolve around a harrowing central theme of violent sexual abuse (potentially the most exploitative aspect of the film), Ishii opts to leave the non-consensual sex to the viewers' imaginations and instead concentrates more on showing his protagonist's acts of savage revenge and her slow descent into madness as her mental state gradually deteriorates. Beautiful cinematography and excellent lighting also go to lend this film a quality that is missing in many other similarly themed films.Inoue, who is probably best known as a swimsuit model, is surprisingly good as the poor girl who finally snaps, and proves that there is much more to her than just a hot bod and a pretty face (although we do get to see a lot of those attributes as well!). The actors playing the three villains of the piece, Shingo Tsurumi, Kazuki Kitamura, and Naoto Takenaka, are also impressive in their roles, being thoroughly despicable and fully deserving of their fates.Not quite so deserving, however, is poor Mr.Nogami (Shunsuke Matsuoka), Chihiro's boyfriend: when he discovers the truth about his woman's past, he runs off like a schmuck, unable to handle the situation; and when he finally comes to his senses and tries to make amends with Chihiro, he ultimately winds up becoming a victim himself. The film ends on a cheery note, with a distraught Chihiro throwing herself off her balcony to her death.Not exactly a laugh-a-minute, feel good kind of movie by any stretch of the imagination, Freeze Me is, nevertheless, a quality film and one not to be missed by fans of savage cinema.

While similar in plot to a revenge movie, this is actually a survival movie. I liked it for its intensity: it doesn't take long to get going, and keeps nonstop tension for the next hour or so. Although it reaches its emotional climax a full half-hour before the end, there's enough tension built up by then to carry it through. It concerns a young lady who's confronted by a gang of men who had raped her five years before. The second meeting is no accident, they've sought after her to victimize her some more. Rape is not a crime of sexual gratification, it's a crime of humiliating domination over another person. That said, Chihiro is just the kind of timid soul who can easily be dominated: she doesn't have the courage to do the sensible thing, instead simply hoping the whole thing will go away. It doesn't, of course, and she's forced into action out of self-preservation. It often reminds me of Miike's earlier film, "Audition". That is said to have a strong message about the treatment of women in Japanese society, and I see this as another side of the same coin: a woman who has had a disabling stigma of shame placed on her, and has to struggle to overcome it. While the ensuing violence is certainly justified, it is not glorified. There is no real victory in this movie. While the things she is subjected to are revolting, the camera is thankfully restrained. Most of the violence against her is offscreen, and even the original attack is shown only in fragments, as a series of flashbacks. There is a lot of nudity here, but I don't see it as exploitational. First of all, it's very much a sex-themed movie, so nudity is pretty much a given. Most of it occurs in the shower: she spends an awful lot of time trying to wash herself clean. The movie does offer plenty of messages, but they're not uplifting or inspiring ones at all: more indictments of double standards in the treatment of women. I thought this was a terrific movie, and one that sticks with you, marred only by some truly awful English-language dubbing (at least, in the version I saw). A movie like this depends on a strong lead actress to carry it, and the voice actress in the U.S. version is just really not any good at all.

To cut a long story short, a Japanese girl begins to wig out when she is subjected to repeated sexual assaults by a gang of vicious thugs. There are moments of real suspense and the blackest of black comedy here, but overall the film is simply too vile and depressing to be remotely enjoyable. Although none of the rapes are particularly explicit, scenes showing the heroine nude in the shower make the viewer feel uncomfortably like a voyeur.The apparent theme, that violence begets more and greater violence, has been done before. And remember, this is brought to you by the same country that gave you Pearl Harbour, P.O.W. death camps, sadistic game shows and Manga cartoons.Enough said.

Freeze Me is Ishii's best film since Gonin, and displays all of the characteristic visual finesse, pacing and editing skills which give him his reputation. A rape-revenge film is hard to do and stay on the right side of comfort: too often the female victim is exploited and seem to 'enjoy' the violent assault, while the (usually male) viewer is encouraged to oogle at the exposed, yielding flesh. Not that I am against exposing the female form, and certainly Ms Inoue is frequently very nice to look at, but it is to Ishii's credit that the crimes are shown as undoubtedly painful, and as humiliating as they surely would be. Apart from some nudity in the plentiful bath and shower scenes, perhaps as a sop to the burger crowd, her unpleasant ordeal is filmed with full sympathy for the victim. The video of her orginal rape is a necessary intrusion, but even here it is in its proper place, viewed as as a flashback not, as it must have been tempting to do, as a over-the top-first act, pileing cruelty on cruelty.Set mostly within Chihiro's small apartment, Freeze Me quickly assumes a claustrophobia which is a chilly and as constricting as one of her newly acquired deep freezes. Within this setting, the three principal killings are staged with sufficient variety and flair to make them distinctive. A stand out is the bath tub killing, a magnificently staged murder which is amongst the best minutes in the film, while the death twitches of the second rapist's legs reminded me of a similarly shocking moment in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.If the basic direction of the film is excellent, then how much more one wishes that the script broadened out more. The rapes, the revenge, the batty soliliquies, the discovery, the denouement - these all follow with the logic of one of those cheesy 70's horror compilation films, where plot expansion is sacrificed due to the demands of the portmanteau format. Here Ichii has considerably more space but spends a lot of the running time on showing a succession of repeating, dramatic events. Often thrilling and well mounted in themselves, they restrict matters to a very narrow narrative path, incidentally almost entirely removing Chihiro from any social context. Because of this she loses some sympathy. The truth is that, once the last body appears on screen, the story has nowhere left to go except into the rain. It's been one hell of a ride in the meantime, but Freeze Me ultimately offers nothing more than a train of horrors seen rightly or wrongly as justification in themselves, and which create story cul-de-sac. Ichii of course has to close his show somehow, and sidesteps the issue with what is practically a narrative sleight of hand, leaving the viewer curiously unsatisfied. It is as if the Wild Bunch have killed all the Mexicans, and a stray bullet has got Deke Thornton too.Interestingly, the HK DVD box shows the heroine apparently frozen, a misleading image to say the least. While perhaps emotionally cold after her traumatising experiences, she never ends up in the cooler herself...