Last week in my Friday Night Horror column I noted that I’d not done a lot of writing for my Frozen in January theme of the month, but that I hoped I’d get back in the groove soon. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I’ve watched quite a few films that fit the theme, but I just haven’t felt the desire to do much writing. I actually started writing a thing on The Martian (a man stranded on the desolate, frozen planet of Mars fits the bill I think – or at least I was gonna try and make it fit) but then a couple of paragraphs in and I couldn’t find the energy. 

That happens sometimes. To everyone I suppose. I just get in a funk and wonder what the heck I’m even doing. Once again I’ll hope that writing this column will get me back in the groove.

Till Death stars Megan Fox as Emma Davenport, a woman who at the beginning of the film is ending the affair she’s been having with Tom (Aml Ameen). It isn’t right, she says. She needs to go back to her husband Mark (Eoin Macken).

God knows why. As we’ll soon realize Mark is a terrible person. It is their anniversary and she meets him at a swanky restaurant. The first words out of his mouth are to complain she isn’t wearing the red dress he likes. She’s wearing a nice little black dress and she’s Megan Fox so she looks good. But it isn’t the dress he was expecting so after the meal he drives her home and forces her to put on the red one.

He’s the kind of guy who orders her dessert even though she says she’s full. He bought her a weird steel necklace for their anniversary and immediately puts it on her, but then frowns at the tickets she bought him to the Super Bowl.

He makes her wear a blindfold while he drives her out to the secluded cabin he owns in the woods. He forces her to keep it on the entire way even though it is at least an hour’s drive and she’s complaining it is making her car sick.

There are twenty minutes of this stuff. Of him being a jerk to her while she sits in sad silence. Twenty agonizing minutes just waiting for her to wake up handcuffed to his corpse.

That’s not really a spoiler because it is in all the promotional material, and any blurb you read about the film is gonna tell you that information. That’s the reason I watched the film. But I nearly turned it off before it got there, the film was so dumb.

So he takes her to this cabin. Makes her sit in the kitchen blindfolded (again) while he lays a bunch of rose petals down and lights a billion candles. Then she wanders around the house looking for him – she puts on the record he leaves a note telling her to play – and then when she finally finds him (in the bedroom of course) his words aren’t something sweet and romantic but a complaint that it took her too long to find him.

He then finally says something nice and they have sex. The next morning she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to him but before she can even really ask him why, he blows his brains out.

The rest of the film involves her trying to get the heck out of there. But the thing is, he’s drained the car of gasoline, broken her phone, and removed any sharp object that might allow herself to get free of him. Eventually, some other folks show up and things get even more difficult for her.

That part – woman handcuffed to a dead man in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, with no means of escape – should be really good. But the character and the film make so many stupid decisions I just wanted it to be over way before the credits actually rolled.

To wit: after he kills himself, blowing blood and guts all over her face, she doesn’t scream or freak out. She doesn’t check for signs of life. She almost immediately drags his body over to the phone to call for help. When she finds it dead, she grabs the gun and tries to blow the handcuff chain to bits. She doesn’t check for a key in his pockets or anything. It takes her half an hour to clean the blood off her face.

She puts his shirt and pants on (for all she brought was that little red dress and apparently some skimpy pajamas, but not an actual over night bag for some reason) but not his socks and shoes even though she’ll spend lots of time wandering around outside in the snow.

Over and over she (and eventually the other characters) make the stupidest decisions ever. The film does dumb things too. Like skipping over important or interesting things. I mean how does she get his shirt off of him and on to her when they are handcuffed together. That’s the kind of thing we need to see!

Periodically Emma will make some kind of smart-ass comment. After dragging his corpse around the house looking for something that might help out she remarks that she was dragging his dead body around for years, long before he killed himself. Ha! and so forth. But there isn’t enough of that kind of thing to make her interesting.

I’m not a big fan of Megan Fox and while she isn’t bad here, she doesnt’ have the charm this kind of role calls for. The direction is fine, it keeps things fairly taut and moving. There are moments that are more or less thrilling, but all of the ridiculous stuff happening kept me shaking my head in annoyance.