What’s the deal with human life? Why does it matter? Why does it matter to the point that government officials dedicate their time to find the missing remains of frozen and raped bodies planted deceptively into the Alaskan dirt by a monster? It seems self-evident that human life is important, but it only begins to reveal its proof when confronted by such a real story of the depths of horror humanity can sink to.

Frozen Ground is based on a true story in Alaska in the early 80’s. Immediately the viewer is drawn into how archaic even 30 years ago appears, without even the use of computers at desk tops. Everything was handled by paper. We can appreciate then the evolutionary leap of digital technology in the transmission of information. Clearly this has not been witnessed since the printing press, but its consequential effects appear to be as significant as inventing the transcription of language or writing itself. And we also in the film bear witness to the Alaskan landscape of ice leading us to question how anyone ever winds up in Anchorage.

Of course because of oil does civilization sprout in the most unseemly places. No one choose to live in Anchorage for instance. It is chosen for them, when the illustrious animal spirit of man seeks more fuel to his fire. Only in an age of civilized sophistication where hydrocarbon combustion lifts man away from necessary struggle on to a more spiritualized plane where he can choose how to place his effort does civilization find itself tenable in the farthest severest reaches of Earth. Yet those who flock to the ends of the Earth, as hinted at doing so out of necessity, also attract the desperate of human kind.

Such desperation appears in the body of Cindy, a gypsy-esque prostitute who was almost murdered by the central monster in the true story. We begin to see the underworld that inevitably appears as an organic growth of a world which is settled out of the harshness of living. There is it appears to us an entire underground of ample sexual work. It’s convenient because by being at the rough edge of civilization no one will ever find out who you are. That’s good because there is no chance that you will ever be shamed if you are a girl trying to get out of a bad situation at home and only have your body to sell in order to survive and grow stronger, away from the malnourishment you escaped. But that’s bad when a degenerate life form of a man realizes it.

What does a man obsessed with the fantasy of sexual abundance when he is too socially impotent to achieve the merits that require its licensure do when he puts two and two together as he sits in isolation in Alaska, scouting for game to hunt? He abuses his imagination, which is used to play with reality in the highest minds ever birthed, toward feeding a simian ego that craves a rationalization of his impotency. He begins in other words to take pleasure in the idea of dominating females as an escape of his sexual lameness. And yet this craftsman of horror that actually existed was able to live in the real world, with a wife and family, while he perfected the indulgence in his sexual degeneracy.

How does a society create such a thing? By failing to create a proper way to be, and therefore a proper way to imagine things.

Grade: B