Frostbitten

Frostbitten (2006): I have just watched the best Swedish vampire movie ever made. Yes, the land of Ingmar Bergman has finally lowered their standards and belched forth their first vampire movie. The tale starts during WWII with a squad of Swedish Nazi soldiers at the Russian front retreating from a Soviet attack. They find a cabin in the deep woods in which to hide and discover something far more dangerous than the Red Army. Years later a single mother moves to a town near the Arctic Circle in Sweden where it stays dark for a month at a time in the winter. She works at the local hospital with a creepy doctor doing genetic experiments. The doctor also has a ‘special’ patient in a coma segregated from everyone. Mom’s teen daughter soon gets invited to a big party and several plotlines start to intersect.

The movie contains a decent plot and lots of comedy. The doctor isn’t all he seems to be and neither is his special patient. The kids steal some pills from his lab thinking they would be good for their party and all start mutating into vampires. One of the funniest scenes is when a teen already on the pills visits his girlfriend’s parents for diner and is served garlic chicken. His solution to this problem after vominating on the diner table does tend to be a bit extreme but fits with the mood of the movie and certainly ruins his chances of making a good impression on the parents.

Soon the town is overrun with teens whose flu like symptoms include nausea, fever, super strength and neck biting. Mom fights to save her daughter and they escape the town at high speed in an ambulance with the coma patient. The movie ends abruptly and: Vampires win! Vampires win! Vampires win! A pretty good genre movie with more than the average set of plot twists. Not a Bergman but good enough for genre fans. The movie is not rated but would probably garner an R for: massive bloodshed, excessive neck wounds, excessive darkness, excessive red pills, nasty Nazis, sleazy doctors, dog biting, and for sucking the wound.