Chiller

CHILLER

A made-for-television movie that was broadcast in May of 1985, Chiller (directed by Wes Craven from a script by J.D. Feigelson) has an intriguing core concept but isn't a terribly well-made project. If you seek it out, be aware that all extant home video versions at the time of this writing have extremely poor picture quality and seem to have been sourced from fourth or fifth generation tapes.

“Chiller was about a man frozen cryogenically ten years ago,” Wes Craven once said (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares). “He's now brought back to life entirely restored, except he has no soul. It's not horror in the sense of a maniac stalking people. Chiller was a kind of interesting thing.”

Chiller (which runs eighty-eight minutes including the end credits) suffers from a poor structure and the presence of a protagonist who is largely passive until her final confrontation with the antagonist. The tale opens with an apparent malfunction at a cryogenic storage facility that results in one frozen human subject (Miles Creighton) being rushed to a hospital. The protagonist (Marion Creighton, mother of Miles) waits around until twenty minutes into the story when a doctor proclaims, “He's alive.” Cut to six weeks later: Miles remains unresponsive on life support. Marion refuses to allow the medical professionals to pull the plug. At the twenty-seven minute mark, Miles finally opens his eyes. Three minutes later, Miles (in a wheelchair) arrives at his wealthy family's home (a sprawling estate) where his step-sister's beloved dog seems afraid of him. Six minutes later, unobserved, Miles snuffs out the pet's life – the first sign that Miles has not returned quite right. Miles goes back to work as an alpha male at his late father's corporation, where he berates the board of directors for giving money away: “Charity does not increase sales. It's non-profit.” Miles promptly fires his father's best friend Clarence (who ran the company while Miles was frozen) and then, emotionless, walks away from Clarence's corpse after the older man drops dead in a stairwell. Miles meets a female employee for drinks and engages in overt sexual harassment fifty-three minutes into the tale when he implies that he'll promote her if she sleeps with him. She inexplicably goes to his hotel room (later, we learn that he blackened her eye there). At the one hour mark, Marion's trusted ally (a Reverend named Felix) ponders, “When a man dies, what happens to his soul?” Six minutes later, Felix and Miles have a confrontation (in which Miles calls Felix a “meddling preacher”) that ends with the implication that the antagonist runs over Felix with his car. Felix survives and (in his hospital room) tells Marion, “The body you revived is empty. He has no soul.” The protagonist finally becomes active seventy-five minutes into the story when she interrupts Miles as he attempts to rape his step-sister. Four minutes later, Miles (with a gaffing hook in hand) stalks his mother through the house, and she locks him in a walk-in freezer. Police arrive and find Miles seemingly frozen to death, but he revives and attacks a cop. Marion shoots and kills Miles. An epilogue depicts a massive malfunction at the cryogenic facility, implying that the area will soon crawl with soulless citizens.

Walter Goodman accurately reviewed Chiller in The New York Times: “The show, written and produced by J. D. Feigelson and directed by Wes Craven as though they were following the commands of a computer, is a collection of scare tactics that ought to be frozen, wrapped in aluminum foil and placed in cryogenic chambers for at least a couple of generations. There are the rustlings and shufflings in the shadows, the creepy music, the free-floating mist, the camera moving ominously toward a victim, the sudden close-up appearances of the bad guy. With all of this, there's scarcely a chill in Chiller.”

One of the lesser projects in Craven's oeuvre, Chiller (with its protracted boring scenes and lack of an active hero) left me cold. Skip this one.