Wind Chill (2007)

APRIL 27, 2007

GENRE: BREAKDOWN, GHOST
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Anyone want to take a guess why Wind Chill is only playing on 49 screens? Here's a hint: because it's a huge waste of time.

Oh crap that was the answer. Oh well.

Many times in this blog I have said that a movie would have been a better 15 minute short film. I could say the same for this, but only if someone went back and inserted 15 minutes worth of interesting material into the film. As it stands, there is precisely ONE nice shot (an almost subliminal wide shot of the snowbound car and a ghost guy with his back to us) and ONE sort of horror-y moment (a ghost opens his mouth and an eel falls out for some goddamn reason). The rest of the movie is of our two leads sitting in a car bickering or talking about random things. Occasionally they see a ghost and walk around a bit before returning to the car, but it's never even remotely suspenseful, scary, or even interesting. Also, the movie laughably attempts to make the song "Walking Around The Christmas Tree" scary by playing it whenever the ghosts are around, but its a moronic idea and a completely failed one at that, to put it nicely.

HAHAHAHA I have to inject here - in the middle of writing this I got up to use the can, grabbing a Fangoria on the way. I happen to flip open to the Wind Chill story and right there, the first 3 paragraphs are basically about how disappointed the writer was to not see anything interesting during their set visit. Don't worry, whoever wrote it, you weren't being given the short straw, for it would have been impossible to see anything interesting during the entire shoot, since no such things occur in the film!

Anyway, what little enjoyment the film offers (besides Clint Mansell's score, which is great, like many of his scores are) is wondering why anyone would want to spend a whole movie with these people (the characters have no names by the way. The credits list them as Guy and Girl). We meet her first, and she's highly unlikeable. But she needs a ride home to Delaware (look, how fucking half-assed does a movie have to be to make goddamn DELAWARE the primary destination of your main character? Jesus.). So she meets the guy (I'm sorry, Guy) via rideshare at the college, and as we find out, he doesn't even live in Delaware. He set up the whole rideshare thing as an excuse to spend 6 hrs with the girl (I mean, Girl) because he thinks she's cute. Later, he reveals he also somehow found out what all her favorite foods are. So our hero is a creepy stalker and our heroine is a snobby bitch. Yay!

The film is also Poseidon-esque in revealing the character's (numerous) previous jobs, allowing them to know how to dress wounds, how FM radios work, etc. And the dialogue is random enough to amuse (at one point, they argue about lasik eye surgery, of all things). But unless you are like me and think people talking about olives for no reason is funny, I can't see why this film would possibly entertain anyone (and it barely entertained me, olive discussion or not).

Most puzzling is why the film goes out of its way to rip off Carnival of Souls and then not bother to deliver the ending. Neither of our characters are dead, despite strange dialogue about how he is stuck in a repeating cycle and she appears to be invisible to every character besides Guy. But I guess revealing one or both of them have been dead through the whole movie would have taken some sort of "cinematic highlight" and thus it wouldn't have fit with the rest of the movie.

And for the love of the game, the film can't even be bothered to earn its R rating! No gore. No nudity. No profanity. The one moment of violence occurs when Guy swings some sort of metal pole at a ghost. This results in them being back inside the car with the pole stuck to his hand. Whatever, movie.

What say you?