Writer/director Charlie Steeds brings us Freeze, the tale of the warship Innsmouth and its rather meagre (for a warship) crew. It’s 1905 and Captain Roland Mortimer (Rory Wilton), first mate Barnabas McCullough (Johnny Vivash), Charles Redgrave (an artist there to document the voyage, played by Jake Watkins), Lieutenant Roth (David Lenik), and seaman Marlowe Spriggs (Ricardo Freitas) are on a mission to the North Pole to search for an expedition led by a friend of Mortimer’s, who sallied forth into the frozen wilds and never returned. They have the added surprise of stowaway Carmen (Beatrice Barrilà) on board, but don’t discover this until the ship becomes frozen into the ice.

Things don’t improve when man-munching fish-creatures invade the ship, forcing all on board to flee into the Arctic wasteland in search of sanctuary. Battling exhaustion, starvation, and a creeping madness, they finally find what they desperately hope will be refuge in a cavern in the snow, but what lurks within may make them wish they’d simply carried on and frozen to death outside.

The characters each seemed stuck firmly into stereotyped boxes from which any real development was largely unable to escape. I couldn’t help but feel the overdramatised acting was an attempt to compensate for this, but instead at times the results almost verged on comedic, which in a strange way probably wouldn’t have been the case had the film been a black and white made in the early 1900s. Each of the many accents were caricatured in the same manner, and the single female character the token target of knuckle-dragging, swarthy-chinned misogyny throughout, so when she turned into the swashbuckling version of Ripley from the Alien films it was something of a relief.

The only character I could keep an eye on without cringing was Sir William Streiner (Tim Cartwright), whose portrayal of villain on the quiet turned completely evil madman was creepily convincing, his dialogue and delivery almost making up for what lacked in the others.

The fish monsters in Freeze were straight out of the Creature Features I used to watch late on Channel 4 as a kid in the UK (this was because when I was growing up, we only had 4 TV channels to choose from, and most of them forcibly kicked you off viewing time somewhere around midnight, leaving you with a rundown of the next day’s programming, a weather report, an instrumental version of the National Anthem, and finally a test signal or silence; their version of telling you to go away to bed). However, points to the crew for not going CGI on that score; these are real actors in costumes, unusual these days even for lower budget productions (though I can’t blame them one bit for using it for the distant view of the icelocked ship).

Few acts of creative expression are without their strong points though, and in this case these were by far the costumes, sets, and filming location (Norway apparently, which explains the very real-looking snow; no salt or foam here, folks). If you don’t mind a bit of ham and cheese then Freeze is watchable enough, but it’s nothing really worth breaking stride for.

4.5 out of 10 Stricken Vessels