Chiller

1985 "Frozen for 10 Years... He Returns To The Living Without His Soul"
4.5| 1h40m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 22 May 1985 Released
Producted By: CBS Productions
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

A wealthy industrialist arranges for his body to be kept on ice in a high-tech cryonic chamber. When the instructions are not followed properly, he emerges from the frozen crypt as an empty, soulless creature with an appetite for destruction.

Watch Online

Chiller (1985) is now streaming with subscription on Prime Video

Director

Wes Craven

Production Companies

CBS Productions

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

Stream on any device, 30-day free trial
Watch Now
Chiller Videos and Images

Chiller Audience Reviews

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,
Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
metalrage666 Business man Miles Creighton, played by Michael Beck is cryonically, (not cryogenically - yes there's a difference), preserved for 10 years due to a medical transplant not being possible at the time of his death. One night his tube malfunctions and he is taken to hospital where his mother arranges for the procedure to be undertaken.The operation is a success and his mother is just happy to have her son back in her life and tries her best to continue life as normal and returns her son to the family company as CEO. To everyone else, Miles is just not normal and appears emotionally distant and ruthless with his decisions in the company and with people in general. The only one who dismisses this is his mother who brushes aside the nay-saying as simply a result of his long time in stasis and the impromptu revival. However it becomes clear that Miles has indeed changed and sparks the debate of whether a deceased person once revived is also revived with a soul. Miles becomes violent and sociopathic towards most people and only when he tries to kill the family priest by running him down with his car does the mother finally realise that what has been returned to her is not her loving son.Miles ends up being re-frozen in a large walk-in freezer and is then shot dead by his mother after he attacks a police officer revealing his demonic eyes to his mother just before he dies. The movie ends back at the cryonic facility with sirens sounding as more cryo-tubes start to malfunction.Chiller can be described as one of Wes Cravens' weaker efforts as this tries to go for a more atmospheric suspense over blood and gore. And as this was made for TV, the violence is quite low-key so even for 1985 it would be hard to consider this a horror movie and is instead more of a thriller. The quality of picture and sound is quite low, so in watching this you can be forgiven for thinking that this came out in the mid- seventies. Most of the cast performances in this are not the best but I felt that Michael Beck did a good job of portraying a soulless psycho where killing or hurting people isn't given a second thought. Chiller also came out at a time when cryonics was starting to regain interest in the early/mid eighties after the failures and legal scandals of the seventies, so the ethical, spiritual and moral implications were being discussed vigorously by religious, family and legal groups and whether cryonically frozen people should be brought back and this movie does briefly touch on that point. As yet a successful revival is still beyond the current technology levels so Chiller is pure fantasy and remains scientifically impossible. It's not the greatest movie by any means but if you manage to catch this on late night TV, then it's at least worth a look.
AJSteele This 80s film has a very good concept. What if you died and were cryogenically frozen immediately after, then thawed out years later. Would you be "soul-less?" Watch the film to find out.Some very creepy moments but it's basically a dated 80s TV movie. Why bother releasing a film to DVD if there is no desire to enhance it? To make money I know, but, it's just wrong. The picture quality is awful and that's enough to make you want to shut it off. The "film" could stand a remake with a much broader scope because of it's interesting premise. There are a dime a dozen horror films out there but I don't think this approach to terror has often surfaced. What makes the film all the more relevant is the fact that man-kind could actually come face to face with this issue for real.
Michael_Elliott Chiller (1985) ** (out of 4) Wes Craven's made for TV flick is frozen from the get go and never goes anywhere. In the film, a man returns to life after being frozen for ten years and guess what he does? If you guessed he goes on a killing spree then you've just saved yourself 80-minutes. Just looking at the film you can tell Craven didn't have much hope in the film because you can't see any of the typical Craven trademarks. The story itself is rather lame and it's nothing new so there's not much to get excited over. There isn't any gore since this was made for television but there's also no suspense, no humor and no good performances. Paul Sorvino has a small role but even he's sleepwalking.
MetalGeek "Wes Craven's Chiller" is the latest addition to my collection of "Dollar Store DVDs," and at this point I think I'm going to have to seek professional help for this addiction, because I don't know how many more of these sub-par films I can stand before my brain explodes...Anyway, "Chiller" may have a famous name director, Wes Craven, in the driver's seat (the back of the DVD I bought makes sure to mention that this film is "from the director of Scream and Red Eye!") and an interesting enough premise but the execution suffers due to its made-for-TV origins. It seems that rich old Mrs. Creighton's heart was in the right place when her beloved son Miles fell ill with a terminal disease, and she had him cryogenically frozen at an experimental lab until a cure can be found. Ten years later, Miles' tube malfunctions and he's thawed out a little early; fortunately, medical science has progressed enough that he is successfully revived. UN-fortunately for the rest of the characters, he's a little, um..."different" after his resurrection, though nobody can convince Mama of this for nearly three-quarters of the film's length. The family dog hates him (so it suddenly disappears), his teenage cousin is scared of the way he leers at her while she's swimming in the pool, and when he takes over the family corporation his underlings are shocked at his cut-throat business practices (the scene in which he forces the kindly old senior partner into a fatal heart attack in a stairwell would probably make Gordon Gecko of "Wall Street" proud). Eventually the family's priest (Paul Sorvino, in a mostly thankless role) realizes that while Miles spent a decade between life and death, he lost his soul (cue creepy music) and it's up to Mama to do something about it before more lives are lost. Though "Chiller" is only about 75 minutes long, it feels a LOT longer than that. The few bright spots for me were seeing a young Jill Schoelen (the young scream queen later seen in "The Stepfather," "Popcorn" and Robert Englund's take on "Phantom of the Opera" before she disappeared off the face of the Earth) and the final battle in the walk-in freezer between Miles and Mama Creighton. It should be noted that the DVD I watched (released on the Digiview label as a double feature with a 50s version of Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart") is absolutely god-awful... the picture is grainy and dark, the sound alternates between overly loud or inaudible, and the cheesy synthesized music, which probably sounded creepy in 1985, comes across as dated and annoying now. I was also left with this nagging question... whose soggy, defrosted legs are those that we see at the beginning of the movie, shambling around amongst the cryo-tubes? It's never addressed!!For a buck, "Chiller" was an OK night's entertainment, but truthfully, unless you feel the need to see absolutely everything that Wes Craven has ever had his hands on, I'd say that you could live a long and happy life without bothering with this one. You got it, "Chiller" should've been left in deep freeze where it belongs.