Wind Chill | REVIEW

Seriously, I did not expect a damn thing from this flick. It was one of those things that I watched to let the time pass. But some movies just seem to have surprises in store, and whatya' know, I actually enjoyed Wind Chill. In fact, I was spooked during certain instances.

George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh are among the producers of the project (who knew, huh), while Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play the leads. Wanna' know what their names are in Wind Chill? Well, Emily plays 'Girl' and Ashton plays 'Guy'. Yep, that's who they are throughout the flick, just 'guy' and 'girl' and that's their names in the credits. Come to think of it, most of the credits say 'Police Officer', 'Pickup Truck Guy', 'Store keeper' etc, even though some of them are pretty important people in the movie. Here's what you need to know about Wind Chill.

It's a horror movie. It's not a documentary about the Earth's climate shift by Al Gore, just so you know. It's a spooky horror movie that happens during a 'wind chill'. Thank you Captain Obvious. In this film, a young woman from a northeastern college shares a ride home to Delaware for Christmas with a strange young man she meets from their school 'Ride Board'. After a few hours of driving, the guy detours to what he considers a shortcut, Route 606. He almost gets rammed by a truck, dodges the oncoming vehicle, causing his car to crash and break down in the middle of nowhere. It's getting cold, and a wind chill has been reported. That's when the 'fun' begins. Strange figures begin to appear, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that something is horribly wrong. It looks like the wind may bring with it more than just a freezing cold breeze.

I compare Wind Chill to movies like Whisper and 30 Days Of Night in the sense that these flicks really nail the 'claustrophobia' effect. The 'stranded' or 'isolated' angle really works well when it comes to horror movies because it gives you a feeling of 'nowhere to run'. It's like one of those nightmares where you're running in circles, unable to escape whatever it is that's bugging you. Another similarity those films named above is the 'winter-time effect'. It works both ways. In a Christmas movie, winter works as a beautiful, cooling time of the year, whereas when it comes to scaring people's guts out, the winter season delivers the 'cold', 'white', and 'difficult to move around' feel. Get what I mean? It tells the audience that it's not a good time to be stranded somewhere because it's cold, it's dangerous, and it's not easy walking to nearby towns because the snow prevents things like that.

Wind Chill, although simple and relatively low-budget, is creepier than a lot of other horror movies I've seen over recent months. I emphasize the word 'spooky' and not 'scary'. Scary would be 30 Days Of Night, Nightmare On Elm Street, and anything by Stephen King. Scary has the 'gore-factor', the blood, and the gutted guts. Spooky, on the other hand, is not so much the ugly faces and the fangs, instead it focuses more on the eeriness of the surroundings including the type of climate and the locality in which the main characters are in. Wind Chill is a certified spooky movie.

I wouldn't say that the acting in Wind Chill is Oscar-material. It's nothing special, but it's good. Both Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes do a great job at being frightened people in the middle of No-Man's-Land. To make the film all the more realistic, very little music is used. This, too, is another plus-point for Wind Chill.

I'm not sure what the bad points are in Wind Chill, though. It's far from being perfect, but when you expect nothing from something, I guess the bad points don't really show because you've expected them all along. That being said, Wind Chill is definitely worth your time, and it's a pretty cool (no pun intended) film to watch at night if you're up for some frights. A very mediocre movie that seems to deliver more than it should, or more than it was initially meant to.
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Wrap : Wind Chill gets a 3.6 out of 5.0. Not the best horror movie in the world, but a worthy-watch.