A producer vanished with the budget — so the Frozen director’s finished hot-air balloon thriller will never be released

Right, here’s an odd one for you: Adam Green, the bloke behind survival horror Frozen, actually shot a full-on hot-air balloon film out in Malta — and it’s never going to see the light of day. No, seriously, this isn’t the usual studio shelf job or ‘creative differences’ waffle. We’re talking missing producer, vanishing money, wild genre confusion — it’s a proper tangle.

The hot-air balloon horror film The Ascent was completed in Malta but has been quietly canned after the producer disappeared with the entire budget.

A Balloon, Not a Shark

Last year, Green’s next project, called The Ascent, popped up in the trades with people assuming it was some bizarre shark film involving hot-air balloons (because apparently that’s what happens now). But if you go by what Green himself said on FanZcene Vids, there never was a shark.

He put it bluntly: the confusion came straight from the film’s own producer, Ryan Hamilton, who, according to Green, got the whole concept wrong when he went announcing it to the public. Green was pretty clear it should have been obvious what sort of story he was making:

‘He should've read it. It’s actually a hot air balloon movie.’

The reality is much less B-movie bonkers — just a hot-air balloon thriller made by a horror director…but more on that ‘made’ bit in a second.

Producer Bolts With the Cash

Here comes the truly juicy bit, and honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. The film was actually shot on location in Malta. Crew flew home to LA, only to discover cheques hadn’t materialised for anyone involved. According to Green, Hamilton just legged it with the money, leaving the production high and dry, and everyone else staring down the barrel of a lawsuit. Of course, that’s easier said than done when the bloke responsible has gone on the lam abroad. Green summed it up in the interview about as bleakly as you’d expect:

‘We left, got back to LA, and nobody ever got paid... So. Yeah. That one will never come out.’

Who is Adam Green Anyway?

In case you’re wondering how Green ended up making a hot-air balloon anything: he’s mostly known for indie-horror oddities. Besides Frozen (the one where people get stuck on a ski lift, not the thing with the singing snowman), Green cranked out the Hatchet slasher series. The original Hatchet (2007) was a splatterfest with Joel David Moore and pals, and scraped a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes — not a disaster, but nothing to ring home about.

• Hatchet II and Hatchet III followed, neither one tearing up the box office or the reviews, but Green did get a bit of redemption with Victor Crowley (2017), which actually pulled in a kinder 67% Tomatometer.

He’s also dipped into anthology territory with 2011’s Chillerama, sharing directing duties with the likes of Joe Lynch and Adam Rifkin, and even wrote for the 2017 game Friday the 13th: The Game.