Cold Fear gets all its slasher movie elements in place before the opening credits roll as a couple off at a remote cabin in the woods decide to ditch their dull game of cards in order to get naked and have some fun (and add some nudity to the movie, as director Nicholas J. Hagen explains on the DVD commentary). However, seems there's a masked lunatic lurking around the grounds and even after they run inside and shut out the lights (somehow thinking that the killer might be tricked into thinking they've disappeared because it's dark inside all the sudden) they find themselves tracked down and killed. While this opening sequence has a reasonably well done moment involving a flashlight and sudden "shock" music, it gets the viewer ready for exactly what they receive: a mediocre indie horror flick that doesn't go out of its way to try anything much new.

Two years later five girlfriends head off to the same cabin and after a little bit of bickering and barely any character development they run into a weirdo caretaker who supplies us with poor comic relief and who tells the girls that it must be the time of the month for one of them as he can "smell their period" - if it wasn't so stupid, I might be offended. Not too long after that (in fact, when one of them goes to the car for a tampon - are co-writers Hagen and Chris Hogan obsessed with menstruation?) they start to get killed off by the same masked killer we saw in the introduction.

From there we're given a completely pointless flashback to an earlier killing one of the girls survived, a whole slew of abrupt emotional swings by the girls, a scene where the girls find a video which shows footage of them being watched, and lots of fairly annoying banter by the killer who's taken to calling them on their cell phones when not fifteen minutes earlier the movie established that their cell phones wouldn't work in such a remote area (and once the phone does in fact work they never try to call the police, not once!).

Overall Cold Fear isn't a horrible effort it's just so chock full of problems and so utterly pointless in the end that it's deemed totally passable. While the acting is generally not bad (and co-star Audrey Goldfarb is nice to look at), the "old school" music score works pretty well, there's a decent moment in the finale involving a bathtub, and it's made with competence by Hagen - it just suffers badly from having no real story momentum and a script that just doesn't fly because there's just no back story whatsoever.

Made for a mere three-grand, Cold Fear certainly looks more expensive than its budget and looks more professional than a lot of the independent movies I've seen - but it's content to be nothing more than a dumb slasher movie, and for that (and all the scripting problems) I can't recommend it.

Visit Full Realm Entertainment for more info. (Chris Hartley, 8/26/05)

Directed By: Nicholas J. Hagen.
Written By: Nicholas J. Hagen, Chris Hogan.

Starring: Angie Leaf, Haley Talbot, Chris Hogan, Lindsay Lewis.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: For an independently released disc the picture here is totally acceptable with solid colours and okay clarity. It gets a little fuzzy in darker scenes, but it's not that big a deal.

Extras: There's not much really here with a photo slideshow of behind-the-scenes pictures and a commentary track by Hagen which is for the most part drab but offers a few alright tidbits.