When five friends take their shared brain cell on vacation to Snow Falls, their New Year’s Eve celebrations take a deadly turn when they decide to eat the snow. What starts as a boozy weekend, quickly spirals deep into the murky depths of paranoia as one by one, the group becomes smaller.
The Story Behind Snow Falls
Staying at one of the group member’s parents’ log cabin for a boozy New Year’s Eve weekend, five friends are in high spirits for the end-of-year party. With kids being kids, it doesn’t take long for the liqueur to start flowing as they drink away the hours and wait for the new year to roll in.
Shortly into the new year, however, the power is cut and they receive word from the radio that a snowstorm is passing – they’re snowed in. It doesn’t take long for hunger, biting cold, and close quarters to start driving a wedge between close friendships but something far more sinister is afoot, while
It’s never confirmed, but as the fun-loving fivesome begins to fall ill, they theorize that it’s all down to a virus contaminating the snow and lo and behold, they were all gorging on the white stuff (no, not that) with their homemade alcoholic snow cones (oops). As the group becomes more and more heat, sleep, and food deprived, paranoia becomes a strong focus as the friends start to turn on each other.
Snow Falls Offers Nothing New, Sadly
While the idea behind Snow Falls is OK, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Throughout the movie, there’s a recurring theme of Cabin Fever that we’ve seen so often in movies like….well… Cabin Fever. There’s nothing fresh about Snow Falls (besides the snow, of course), that makes it stand out from the plethora of ‘stuck in cabin/house/spaceship with a group of friends’ movies that came before it.
The Friends in Snow Falls are Annoyingly Idiotic
While the characters themselves are OK, they aren’t the sharpest knives in the draw. They don’t seem to have an ounce of logic between them. Furthermore, this collective idiocy doesn’t stop at the ‘let’s eat the snow’ idea. There’s an abundance of moments throughout Snow Falls that will leave you questioning any shred of faith you may have been holding about the future of mankind.
Snow Falls isn’t all Bad
We may have gotten off on the wrong foot here – but we still stand by what has been said -, but Snow Falls does have its moments. There are some scenes that are carried off well and the feeling of paranoia experienced by the unwitting housemates stretches to the viewer as seeds of distrust are sown and each of the characters comes under scrutiny. The questions the movie has you pondering aren’t all along the lines of ‘how long has this got left?’
While it’s a relatively short movie at 79 minutes, we still feel more could have been done to engage the viewer. Horror moments are few and far between, which is a shame as those few moments were actually pretty decent.
Snow Falls Review Summary
With its tired and worn premise, Snow Falls lacks any innovation. The short runtime fast becomes a blessing, as cliche after cliche hit like a cliche barrage you will almost feel any positive thoughts slowly chipping away with each platitude driven home.
Yes, there are some great scenes to enjoy but not enough to carry the movie to the end. Expect a lot of dialogue, heaps of cliches, and unanswered lingering questions. We never did find out what was actually happening.
Remember, don’t eat the yellow snow. In fact, just steer clear of eating snow altogether.
