When a movie's title is a bad pun (it's equally bad in English - "Frostbite") you know you're going to be in for a good time. After endless amounts of lame comedy and drama productions from Sweden, it's refreshing to see that Anders Banke tries something new: a hilarious, suspenseful vampire movie, the first vampire movie to have ever come out of Sweden. In a way, it's an epic. Not that Banke's movie is anywhere near pretentious enough to be called an epic.

Frostbiten opens with some fantastic footage of a snow-covered, dark landscape, accompanied by haunting music that perfectly set the tone for the movie. Already at this point we can tell this will be different, and infinitely better, than most Swedish films.

What comes after that is an amazing, high-paced film with energetic performances and brilliant touches of humour. How can you not laugh at a little dog telling our hero that he's going to burn in hell? Or the fact that the main vampire is killed by a garden gnome? Though it is not perfect (especially not the badly executed ending), Frostbiten is extremely entertaining, clever and positively brilliant. The "shocker" scenes are shocking, the comical scenes are funny, and performances are great all around, with the possible exception of Grete Havnesköld, who is pretty lackluster as Saga, our main character. Emma Åberg's Vega, on the other hand, is an absolute gem.

Frostbiten is an amazing film that fulfills all your hopes and makes you believe that Swinema actually has a future. A bizarre, hilarious and competently put together action and gore fest that proves that even Swedish people can make high quality movies.(r#36)

Over here in Europe, and especially during the annual Horror & Fantasy Festivals all over the continent, "Frostbite" got endlessly praised and acclaimed as one of the most innovating and creative new vampire movies of the last few decades, but you honestly have to put all this eulogy into perspective a little. First of all because European horror critics understandably wish to promote our own stuff as opposed to that uninspired American "junk" and, secondly, because the guys behind the camera (director Anders Banke and producer Magnus Paulsson) used to be involved in the organization of the Swedish Fantasy Festival and thus the critics support each other. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the horror-festivals and I'm grateful that I can go and watch a truckload of new cult stuff there every year, but this circle of European Fantasy Festivals is undeniably some sort of elite club. That being said, I don't intend to state "Frostbite" is a bad film or anything … It just isn't as original and refreshing as it pretends to be. Given the North-Swedish setting, the tag line and the synopsis, I was anticipating a sort of predecessor to "30 Days of Night" but it's actually something completely different. The story revolves on an obsessive doctor trying to create the ultimate breed of vampires ever since he himself became one during World War II. He invented these red pills to fine-tune vampirism, but they accidentally end up at a local teenager's house party and all the guests gradually transform into bloodthirsty monsters. "Frostbite" features a lot of ideas and simultaneously attempts to parody the horror genre, but unfortunately it only became a very incoherent, not-so-funny and seemingly finished horror movie. The intro-flashback is overlong and, in general, not a whole lot is happening during the first hour. The last half hour compensates for a lot, though, since the film becomes extremely gory, absurd and tasteless. The actual ending comes abruptly and makes no sense at all, but the foregoing house-party massacre is quite cool to watch. The special and make-up effects are excellent (clearly, most of the budget went there) and the acting performances of the primarily young and inexperienced cast members are more than adequate. "Frostbite" is definitely an interesting and potentially terrific film, but the writers nearly didn't make enough use of the location's possibilities and the polar night concept.

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Bad focus from time to time. Lack of creativity.

EDITING: Pretty good considering the cinematography.

ACTING: Various

LIGHTING: Nice but i prefer fog and mist-lighting effects in horror movies.

MUSIC: Very well written and performed. Almost too good to work effectively together with some of the scenes. Gets too melodramatic at times, like the old silent films that scared the crap out the audience a long time ago.

DIRECTING: ?

VAMPIRES: Super nice! Realistic make up and CG.

SCARE: Bad timing in editing and bad choice of camera angles. If the movie tries to make the audience jump out of their seats with fear, we jump with laughter.

HUMOUR: Funny situations appear in the story. Maybe the next Swedish film project.

OPENING SCENE: Boring and not quite convincing.

SCRIPT: Correct thinking in structure but unfortunately, some of the characters feel superfluous. Vampire-Sebastian would be a lot more fun idea for a movie.

OTHER COMMENTS: They have overseen some of the best opportunities to capture beautiful and scary scenes involving white snow, fog and blood. Desipite the fact that the action is taking place in the middle of the cold winter, this wasn't used as a physical problem for the characters. I believe it was much colder for the slow working film crew than what was captured in the final result of the film. Where did all the money go?