Wind Chill

Wind Chill
2007
Directed by Gregory Jacobs

Wind Chill is a low budget horrorish film starring Emily Blunt (from a bunch of movies I've never seen before i.e. The Devil Wears Prada) and Ashton Holmes who played the son in A History of Violence. I can guarantee you that Wind Chill bears no resemblence whatsoever to those films!

This is going to be a pretty short review because I didn't care much for this one. The weird thing is that the acting is actually pretty good. Emily Blunt is quite good as a university student who has a really hard time not being a right bitch, and Holmes plays the nervous stranger (no names given for any characters during the film) giving her a ride home for Christmas with surprising excellence - surprising, that is, for a horror movie. In fact, Wind Chill started out so well, I actually became quite hopeful about its overall quality. The setup is great: A girl needs a ride home for Christmas, and a friend suggests the bulletin board where people are offering to share rides with people going in the same direction. She arranges to get a ride home to Delaware with another student she doesn't know. The drive is pretty awkward. The girl is rude and frigid, but the guy is pathetically earnest nonetheless. The tension builds up as the conversation builds; the guy claims to be from Delaware, but he keeps slipping up on information that he should probably know. Also, he seems to know a little too much about the girl.

At this point, the movie could go anywhere. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the guy takes a "shortcut" down a snowy backroad, and gets run off the road by another motorist. You'll probably never bother watching this movie now, so I'll just say that it's a ghost road and they're stuck there in the freezing cold together, and it turns out the guy set up the whole ride thing just to get a chance to talk to the girl because he has a crush on her, and a ghost police officer/murderer is stalking them (Martin Donovan from "Weeds"), and blah blah blah. For a movie that's only an hour and a half long, it really drags on from the moment they get into the accident.

Bottom line: not recommended, but by no fault of the actors. I wish they had turned it into a weird romantic comedy when the girl found out the guy was stalking her. The ghost story was boring and not scary and totally ruined everything.

3.0