Day 111: Wind Chill

Wind Chill

Even the poster is boring

I had started watching another horror movie, when about 5 minutes in, I realized that it was going to be so horrifically bad that I could not bring myself to finish it. Reviewing it would have been like criticizing a non-English speaker on their pronunciation of the word “susceptible”. So I decided to try something else. How about a movie produced by George Clooney? That could be good. Emphasis on could. Damn you, Clooney!

Wind Chill stars Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada, The Adjustment Bureau) as a college girl looking to make her way home for Christmas break. She's not given a name and is referred to as “Girl” in the credits, so I'll just refer to her as such. She cannot fly home and decides to check the ride board to see if she can tag along with someone driving to Delaware. As luck would have it, she finds that someone is driving there and sets up the ride. The driver is an awkward college boy (Ashton Holmes, A History Of Violence, The Pacific) who is labeled as “Guy” in the credits. The ride is very awkward as the girl is rude and bitchy while the guy is awkward and weird. The guy takes a short cut up a snow-covered rural road and the girl calls him out on not knowing where he is going. A car headed in the opposite direction hits them and they are left stranded on the side of the road. After some discussion, it is revealed that the guy is not from Delaware and is in fact using this time to get closer to the girl. He has been watching her for a long time and even knows the food she likes. As the night goes on, the being to see apparitions. A policeman comes to their window and, unaware of their predicament, tries to get the girl in the back of his car. The guy rescues her, but they are terrorized throughout the night by spirits of people who had died on the road by the hand of the policeman. Will the guy and the girl be able to survive the ghosts and the cold?

"Wait, Bob Marley is dead? But I just bought his cd!"

Wow these people are annoying. They are so incredibly unlikable that it was a chore to get through this movie. Why should I care what happens to the characters when I hate their guts. The girl is particularly nasty and the guy is a creepy stalker. There are plenty of warning signs and red lights telling her that this guy is weird, but despite eventually finding out that he is just a creepy stalker, so still goes along for the ride and stays with him. And why does she care if something bad happens to him? WHY?! I haven't cheered for a villain this hard since The Blair Witch Project. I want only bad things to happen to them and no one else while sitting through this movie. The audience will never have sympathy for the characters, thus negating making it a horror movie. They might as well have made it a revenge movie for the ghosts. At least that way I would have had something to cheer.

The movie's story is fairly rudderless, jumping from the present, to flashback, to sort of present within a flashback within the blah blah blah. What is the real story here? Is it two unlikable people being stuck in a car or is it a murdering policeman from the 50's? A majority of the movie is spent with just the two in the car, which is very boring. Why not introduce the ghost aspects sooner than 45 minutes into the movie? There aren't a lot of special effects used in the movie and when they are used, they're not too impressive. There is very little action and the only scares are jump-at-you-from-the-dark moments and musical flourishes. I feel like they were going for some sort of psychological, slow-build thriller and ended up with psychological torture of the audience. Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes are both very annoying. The cast is very small and they are relied heavily to carry the movie, which is unfortunate. I suppose it is not entirely their fault because they are written to be complete assholes, but it's not enough to excuse poor performances.

"Are you two under the influence of shitty character development?"

Wind Chill was an incredibly annoying and boring movie that barely registered as horror. The characters are unlikable and the story is jumbled and confusing with no real purpose. There is no real action to speak of and any effects that are used look poor. The acting was not good and the directing not much better The movie was clearly made on a tight budget, which makes me wonder what exactly George Clooney produced, because it sure wasn't a lot of money. Overall, Wind Chill is not worth your time and I have to wonder if I would have been better off watching the previously mentioned first movie.

2/10