Winter of Frozen Dreams
2009 (?? Not yet released.)
This is the movie that spurred an major internet buzz about some reputed graphic
full-frontal nudity from the beautiful and stacked Thora Birch.
It chronicles a real-life 1977 murder case in Madison, Wisconsin. Barbara
Hoffman had a genius IQ and straight A's as a biochemistry major at UW Madison
when she dropped out of school to make good money as a hooker. Not long
afterwards, she concocted a scheme to kill one of her clients, a lonely and
likeable old fella, for his home and his insurance money. While she was under
indictment for that murder, her fiancé died of the same causes. She was the
beneficiary of a spectacularly large life insurance policy - $750,000, The
fiancé only made $9,000 per year as an AV techie, but Hoffman had been making
the massive payments out of her hooking money. At one point she told her pimp
she was going to kill her fiancé for the insurance money.
Doesn't sound all that much like the work of a genius, does it?
Neither of the men she allegedly killed was particularly unhappy about
placing their assets in her name. They were lonely, unhappy men and she made
their lives better. They may have found the whole deal suspicious, but if so,
they didn't care.
The film is marred by an almost total lack of suspense, and offers no
insight into the case. Hoffman was convicted of one murder, acquitted of the
other, and is still serving her life sentence to this day. She has never
talked to anyone about the case and remains almost a total cipher, a fact
which left the screenplay with no meat on its bones. At the end of the film we
know nothing about her at all. The other characters are
uninteresting and underdeveloped, the dialogue is drab, and there is no action
of any kind. The film essentially consists of 90 minutes of tedious low-budget
exposition, followed by about a minute of anti-climactic resolution. Even if
the screenwriter had written The Red Violin, however, the performances
would still have turned the whole thing sour. Some of the actors are just
plain incompetent, and all of the performances are so low-key as to be nearly
comatose.
Winter of Frozen Dreams is just a dull, unrewarding misfire which really
has nothing going for it, not even guilty pleasures. It's not even be an
above-average made-for-cable offering. Perhaps not even average.
"Apart from that, how did you enjoy Our American
Cousin, Mrs. Lincoln?"
Sorry. There was nothing worth capturing. The internet stir was a false
rumor. There is no nudity of any kind. Birch has some sex scenes, but the most
you'll see is her getting bounced around while wearing a very large granny bra. The whole
project was essentially a waste of my time.
