Wasilla only place to see Butcher Baker movie

PALMER — Maybe it’s fitting that Wasilla seems to be the only place in the Last Frontier to catch the Alaska-themed crime thriller “The Frozen Ground.”

The movie is, after all, based on the crimes of Robert Hansen, the so-called Butcher Baker, Alaska’s most infamous serial killer. One of the authors of the most cited book recounting Hanson’s crimes, Walt Gilmore, is a longtime Valley resident.

And while Hansen — played in the film by John Cusack — was an Anchorage resident, he famously did most of his killing along the Knik River, where he’d fly his victims and release them to be hunted for sport.

The movie was one of a few that have been filmed in Alaska after the state started offering tax breaks to filmmakers. Another, “Big Miracle,” saw a much wider release.

According to photographic evidence on Facebook, at least some of those shoots took place in the Valley. In one well-circulated photo, Nicolas Cage, who plays the Alaska State Trooper who tracked Hansen down, stands for a shot on the bridge over the Matanuska River that now services a bike path running alongside the Old Glenn Highway.

The Anchorage Press, the Frontiersman’s sister publication, was tarted up to look like a strip club for exterior shots depicting pipeline-era downtown.

Word in movie circles is that big theater chains balked at the idea of screening the film widely since it was simultaneously released online in a streaming video-on-demand service.

Reports in other media of attempts to screen the film in other venues in Anchorage seem to indicate that Valley Cinemas next to Wal-Mart will be the only house showing it in Alaska.

Which, of course, means that the Anchorage-area actors in the film will have to drive to Valley Cinemas to catch it. Though, of course, they can still buy it at iTunes, which is also a good place to visit to watch the trailer, which is also on YouTube.

As a film, “The Frozen Ground” has been getting pretty ho-hum reviews. The popular criticism aggregator site rottentomatoes.com gave it a 55 percent rating.

“The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable,” reads a review of the film from The New York Times.

“The movie’s late-night cable feel and skeevy salaciousness grinds everything to a snowy slush,” reads another in the New York Daily News.

At any rate, the movie opened at Valley Cinema Friday with five showings daily. Two extra screenings on Saturday were for people over 21, meaning it was playing in the theater that serves beer.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.