Even though Shawn Ashmore knew it was coming, there was nothing the actor could do to stop the endless amount of jokes coming his way when he signed on to do the new survival thriller "Frozen." After all, Ashmore starred as the cool and sometimes blue-tinted Iceman in the "X-Men" movie trilogy, so who's to say he couldn't skate out of any situation?

"Needless to say, there were many, many Iceman jokes -- I stopped counting at 1,000," Ashmore said, laughing in a recent @ The Movies interview. "It's to be expected, though. It kind of goes with the territory and it was all in good fun."

Fresh off of its premiere last month at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah, the film opens in limited release on Friday. Written and directed by Adam Green, "Frozen" follows the peril faced by Joe (Ashmore), Dan (Kevin Zegers) and his girlfriend, Parker (Emma Bell), after they cajole a lift operator into letting them take one final night run down a ski slope.

But fun turns to fright when the operator is pulled away from his duties, and his replacement surmises that the trio made it back down the slope. Instead, the skiers are stranded in a chair on the lift 50 feet off the ground and worse yet, the remote New England lodge only operates on the weekends, leaving little hope that anyone will find them for five days.

And thanks to the brutal elements and the creatures of the wild, anything could happen if their attempts to land safely on the ground happen with any measure of success. (For the record, the filmmakers researched that cell phone coverage would not work in the area where they were stranded.)

Ashmore said he was a skier growing up and spent "many an hour on a chairlift," so the actor didn't come into "Frozen," well, cold. And while the idea of being stranded in a chairlift didn't really rattle him during the shoot, the actor admits watching the completed film sends a chill up his spine.

"We were up on a chairlift for 12 hours a day for a month and a half and nothing dangerous happened, so I'm actually still fairly comfortable on one," Ashmore said. "When I watch the film it makes me think twice about it. I get a pit in my stomach and say to myself, 'Oh, this could be disastrous.'"

No matter how remote the chance of something happening like the circumstances in "Frozen" is, Ashmore said that won't prevent the idea from wedging itself into the psyche of its audience members.

"The film definitely preys on primal fears. I'm pretty comfortable with heights, so that didn't matter, but the thing that really got to me was the isolation of these characters," Ashmore said. "Even as we shot the film, we couldn't come down off the chairs, so there was little to no interaction with the crew. So basically it was just us three actors trying to entertain ourselves enough to get through the day working. That was an interesting dynamic that affected me in a way that I didn't expect. The fear of being alone sort of became true for me in real life."

Even Green remained on the ground for the duration of the shoot (which took place about an hour from Park City), thanks to some creative shooting techniques.

"I had a walkie-talkie in my jacket so I could communicate with Adam, but he used a 50-foot tall techno-crane to shoot the film," Ashmore said. "They would load the camera and adjust the lenses and hoist the camera up to our level."

Since the film was an independent production, Ashmore said the time he and his castmates spent suspended in midair wasn't so much about effect as it was financial necessity.

"The reason we had to be up there so long was because of the sheer mechanics of an old chairlift," Ashmore explained. "For us to go to the peak and come back down to the ground would take 45 minutes, which is obviously a lot of time (and costs a lot of money) on an independent film when you want to shoot 10 takes for a scene. So we'd come down after six hours to have lunch and go back for another six."

Having all the time on the chair lift, of course, gave Ashmore more than ample opportunity to think about what he would do in real life: Would he jump and risk injury and whatever animals were awaiting him on the ground? Would he just go to sleep and hope that he wouldn't succumb to hypothermia? Would he try to find another creative way to get back down to safety?

"Honestly, I've asked myself those questions a gazillion times while filming the movie and I still don't think I know what I'd do," Ashmore said. "I don't know what I would do unless I was actually in that position and my face was freezing or my nose was starting to fall off. I'd like to think that I would stay calm and come up with a plan -- maybe jump or this or that. I think the great thing about the movie is, every time you think you have a solution, it just doesn't work out. There is no safe way."