Deep Freeze!! Top 3 Wintry Escape Scenes From The Cinema

Vancouver has been thrown into the deep freeze!

A cold front has swooped down from the Arctic, crippling the city. Traditional zen lotus-eaters are losing their minds in traffic, lineups for winter tires are two-blocks long and yoga classes across the lower mainland have been suspended; it is pure chaos in the rainy city!

With more snow on its way, the Krakit team are preparing for a full-out winter assault. And what better way to prepare for snowmageddon then a light-hearted review of our favourite snow-bound escape movie scenes?

Here are our top three wintery escape scenes from the cinema:

3. The Spy Who Loved Me

Roger Moore, as James Bond, is up to no-good in an Austrian chalet when Queen and Country calls. Leaving a fair maiden (double-agent) wanting Moore, Bond dons a Ronald McDonald ski suit and heads out the door. The fair maiden shows her true hair-colour and calls in a ski attack.

With four armed agents in pursuit, Bond does some epic glacier skiing. His path takes him through a narrow ice shoot, he fires a ski pole rocket at one of his enemies and he pulls off a backflip half twist before skiing off a mountainside.

Of course Roger Moore was never on skis in Austria, but neither were the stuntmen. The entire sequence was filmed in Nunavut, Canada on Asgard Peak on Baffin Island.

The final cherry on the escape is the parachute design - a giant Union Jack flag. Well-done James.

2. The Empire Strikes Back

By far the best film of the Star Wars series (fingers-crossed for Rogue One), Empire starts on the icy planet of Hoth. After investigating a meteor (probe droid), Luc is sucker-punched by a snow beast. The young Jedi is taken back to the Wampa's layer where he is imprisoned in ice foot shackles.

Upon waking, Luc tries desperately to free himself before remembering that he has this wonderful gift called the force. Using Yoda's lessons, Luc is able to summon his light sabre from across the ice cave, cut off his shackles and slice the arm off his captor.

I guess with the force any Vancouver Escape Room might seem like a kids ballroom. But then again, maybe not...

1. The Thing

John Carpenter's The Thing is a sci-fi classic. The film includes aliens, a wintery locale on Antarctica and the always-entertaining action star, Kurt Russel. More of a mystery (who-done-it) tale then the other two films, The Thing has a group of scientists and remote technicians wondering who is the assimilated alien in the group. The snow flies, the crew accepts their fate and one-by-one the infected are killed off.

The final scene has MacCready and Childs share a drink, while the research station burns in the snowy background. Both men suspect the other of being infected, but with nothing left to fight for, a thin possibility of survival and the doomed fate of mankind looming off-screen, the two choose to let the time run out, leaving the audience guessing as to who was human.

And If you brave enough to stand the cold, come out to our Vancouver Escape Room! You might be shivering, but it won't be from the cold!

The Escape Game Phenomenon

"Escape the Room" real-life challenges are becoming hugely popular around North America. The movement started in Asia, spread to Western Europe and popped up on the west coast in the last year or so.

The room challenges come on the heels of a widely successful online gaming genre where gamers must escape a certain set of parameters with only a limited amount of clues. The offline version is now eclipsing the popularity of its predecessor, as more gamers choose to do their sleuthing in person rather than from in front of a screen.

One of the major benefits of the 'real-life' experience is the social interaction. Sure the new console platforms come with helo-grade communication headsets, but they don't compare to the experience of climbing around a room with your friends, shouting out directions and laughing the whole time.

Jerry, from South Carolina, may come up with a few 'zingers', but Rich, your oldest friend, will always have you laughing the hardest. Especially when he references your high school awkwardness.

For parents, the escape rooms present an environment that is more controllable than the Internet. It is free of creepers (the two-legged kind) and online bullying opportunities. But the most encouraging thing for parents is the promotion of problem solving in a setting outside of the classroom. Kids get to work through the required tasks and ask for clues if they need them, so they don't get overly frustrated. They get to use all their education at once, to solve actual problems. And who knows, maybe one day they will be trapped in zombie apocalypse.

Some media analysts speculate that the immersive escape experience is an intermediate step between full-on virtual reality and the motion capture experience supplied by console apparatuses like the Wii. Technology can't quite offer the virtual experience console games tease us with. The analog purity of the first-person real-life experience is much more enticing.

But maybe the biggest draw is society's new desire to de-tech, especially after a long workweek staring at screens. The escape rooms provide a tech cleanse of sorts, where participants can turn away form their mobiles, detach from their social media platforms and tune back to the thrill of real life experience.

If you haven't tried this latest craze, you really owe it to yourself to give it a whirl. Vancouver's top rooms are at Krakit. Come try one of the four escape puzzles and unplug for an hour of fun.