lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: Spain

Rat­ings:
Kim: 4 out of 5
Justin: 3 ^1/2 out of 5

Notes: The Eng­lish trans­la­tion of this film’s title is Shiver and that may be the most ambigu­ous title of any film we’ve watched thus far. Shiver could mean any damn thing and, hav­ing watched the film, I’m not exactly sure what the title is in ref­er­ence too.. I guess it is just a reac­tion to fear itself. On one hand, you rent a movie not know­ing a damn thing about it, on the other hand you rent a movie not know­ing any­thing about it. I sup­pose that if you are are a film­maker who is con­fi­dent that your film works then ambi­gu­ity is not a bad way to go. I think this one works.

When, Santi, a trou­bled young teen with semi-prominent canine teeth and an aller­gic reac­tion to sun­light moves into a val­ley town with his mother to escape the direct sun­light, a num­ber of bru­tal killings occur. The Vil­lagers view Santi, his mother and their city-slicker ways with sus­pi­cion (as vil­lagers are known to do) and Santi spends the rest of the film pro­fess­ing his inno­cence and lead­ing his own inves­ti­ga­tion to find and cap­ture the lightning-fast crea­ture that seems to be doing the real killing.

I pre­fer my hor­ror sim­ple and effec­tive, and this is far from sim­ple. It’s kind of a mur­der mys­tery wrapped up like a hor­ror movie. The prob­lem is even though Eskalofrío works great as a hor­ror film, as a mys­tery it vio­lates one of the big rules of that genre: it with­holds infor­ma­tion until the end so there is no real way for the audi­ence to fig­ure what’s going on. The fun thing about the super­nat­ural is almost all of the myths behind our favorite movie mon­sters are based some­what in fact. (Cau­tion, slight spoiler): This film doesn’t have as much to do with vam­pires as you would believe, but the under­ly­ing sit­u­a­tion of the film is one very pos­si­ble, but implau­si­bly com­pli­cated, series of events. Really, the whole gim­mick of this film is to over­load the viewer with as many red her­rings as pos­si­ble so as to con­fuse them and then send some mur­der­ous child-beast in to send them over the edge with panic. Which, actu­ally, totally works.

CAUTION SPOILER DO NOT READ: Not to beat a dead horse or any­thing, but, again, why the hell were so many peo­ple scared of that cute lit­tle Japan­ese boy in The Grudge?? Between Eskalofrío and [Rec] I am pos­i­tive that Spain has the scari­est flesh eat­ing lit­tle girls on the planet.