Below Zero (2011)

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) This should have been much better. I mean: Below Zero’s premise barely makes sense, but as a dramatic conceit, the idea of an author going to a secluded location to break out of writer’s block is a great one—there have been plenty of decent movies incorporating that idea. But as Below Zero piles up the details, it gets dumber and dumber—the writer locks himself up in a meat locker, he imagines a torture-horror story that merges with real events (mostly) and soon enough we’re in this nightmarish puree of maybe-reality-maybe-fiction spiced with ugly horror clichés both visual and conceptual. Edward Furlong gets a late career starring role(s) here but doesn’t do much with the opportunity, while Michael Berryman does turn in a much better performance. I’m more receptive than most to the idea of fiction bleeding into a writer’s reality, but the way it’s done in Below Zero is completely uninvolving: it just resolves into a big bunch of arbitrary nonsense without much of a point to it. This isn’t worth the trouble: even in the realm of low-budget horror films, there are much better movies about writers looking for inspiration having trouble with intrusive fiction. (It’s a subgenre.)