The "Cold Prey" franchise is Norway's fine showcase in the slasher genre, in the best mainstream horror traditions of the 2000's. I genuinely miss these type of movies, what followed after TCM remake and Wrong Turn in 2003, and endured till around 2010-2012, though with less great examples than the average or bad ones. The first two installments in the "Fritt Vilt" franchise proved to be, if not orginal, then fun, violent, tight, with good action, style and a decent scream queen, all's good. Years later, as the winter starts showing its face, I finally turned to its prequel, "Cold Prey 3", previously being kept away by the pile of underwhelming opinions. It's without a doubt a sizable step down, down in the cinematic flatlands.
It's not like the story of "Cold Prey" 1&2 was something unheard of or more in-depth than Your average slasher, but the third part really manages to be far more void of any real substance, providing truly paper-thin plot, made feel even worse on the background that this is a prequel, meaning, it should've at least aspired to give us a half-interesting story behind the psychopathic killer. Plot is shallow, slow and predictable all the way up to the credits. Instead of an invested prequel we get a weak, uninspired copy of the average American slasher flick at that time. Any investment in the characters of a highly cliché group of friends is little, boring and fails to raise sympathies. Quite often, especially in horror, the lack of depth, emotion and substance is tried to be compensated with audiovisual flair, style, gore, suspense and atmosphere. Sadly, "Cold Prey 3" achieves more frustration than enjoyment in all things aesthetical. Half of the movie consists of cat & mouse games, chasing, hiding, most of it executed with minimal tension and excitement. Tedious is the word. Next up we are all at least anticipating those gory, crazy kills, of which there are none, as all the deaths are really uninspired and mostly cinematographed using close-ups and shaky cam. Lastly, it was a lot less wintery movie than I expected.
"Cold Prey 3" at the first glance is seemingly an alright slasher, having decent actors, production design and a visual aura that didn't make a cheap first impression, but something, a lot, has went wrong or lazy, and the final product is an uninspired, tepid horror with absolutely nothing creative to offer. It did remind me of another horror film called "Rovdyr" or "Manhunt", which came out two years prior, in 2008, and it's also Norwegian, also slasher and has almost all the same flaws... My rating: 4/10. For reference, I rated the first two movies 7/10.