Wind Chill [2007 Ghost and Surviving-the-Cold Horror] [Bonus Review: Crackle on Roku LT]

BLOT: (27 Dec 2011 - 02:03:51 PM)

Wind Chill [2007 Ghost and Surviving-the-Cold Horror] [Bonus Review: Crackle on Roku LT]

To be honest, I watched this because I wanted to see something from Crackle.com on my Roku LT. Free movies can mean a wide number of things, but generally they either mean you are watching generally crappy movies through a potentially shady site [some that later ask you to start paying for said crappy movies], you are watching public domain movies that are probably just taken from the Internet Archive, or you are watching movies, crappy or not, with commercials. All things considered, the third option is the best, if done right, but since this is only PARTIALLY a review of Crackle on a Roku box, I'll get to that in a moment.

As for the movie Wind Chill, a 2007 horror/thriller of slightly mixed ingredients [getting to that], it was ok. Girl¹, played by Emily Blunt, needs a ride home [or will have to take the bus, which I suppose is something like undying death to a socialite of her standing] and Guy, played by Ashton Holmes, has posted a sign to the "ride board" going her way on the day she needs it. The two start on a bad foot, her pretty-little princess tendencies first making her out to be a total bitch and then, a few questions in, the tables turn and we begin to realize Guy is hiding something and it might not be entirely friendly. A short, throw-away bathroom scene later, we get Guy veering off into a backroad and eschewing the safer highway. She quizzes him and realizes even more of what he says is a front, and at this time they run off the road. Now they are stuck in the middle of nowhere, no way to get through to anyone, and a Winter Storm is coming. While Guy's story is weird enough to convince her that she is in a cheap rape-and-slasher storyline, turns out her luck is worse than that, as strange apparitions start crawling through the woods and her only ally is a boy she can't trust. And then an even worse apparition shows up, and things start on a downward spiral.

The first problem the movie has is that it decides to juggle three types of horror movies, one as a possible red herring, and manages to only just not have the types clash in the worst way. First we got creepy stalker horror, ala Misery. That fizzes pretty quick [cannot decide if this is a good thing or not, though]. Then comes Surviving-the-Cold horror, ala Frozen. That's always a good, cheap, and fairly atmospheric technique, especially if your viewers watch during a chilly Winter. Third is the ghosts-with-bad-intent story line, which is the most pure horror of the three, and is meant to be sort of the key horror at the center of the flick. The mix could work, and does mostly work, two people in tighter circumstances than is comfortable or having to rely on one another to not freeze, and...well, you begin to see the problem. The ghosts are mostly an issue if the two leave their shelter and when they don't they kind of seem to be fine. You could lose any of the three threads and probably make the other two make more sense, but there you go. At least had they not fizzled the stalker storyline you might could have justified moments of claustrophobia or him doing things like chasing her down in the woods and dragging back...for "her own good".

Not to mention the writer and/or director's insistence on working in a few horror tropes just to do it. We got a ghost spewing eels out of his mouth², and feet slipping on telephone poles, and old weird structures with frozen people inside, and old newspapers AND old snow plow sorts who explain the past, and the gas station scene. This latter happens early on and not only involves a lot of creepy staring yokels but has what seems to be a conspiratorial whisper between Guy and the gas station attendant, and has a several minute long scene where Girl locks herself in the bathroom and then FREAKS OUT and gets all eye-balling the locals and is sure something is up, something more than her just getting jammed in a bathroom. The scene, it would seem, would fit sort of the Ramsey Campbell mode of horror, where little weird things add up to suggest you have entered into a world where creepiness is constant and getting moreso, but rarely feed into the direct plot itself. A lot of the better treatments of the ghosts, where you just see shapes walking down the road in the distances or through the woods without any real definites about what is going, are also in this Campbell mode, and being not extraneous like the bathroom scene, are the best part about the movie. Atmospheric, tense, and something that anyone who has been locked in with less than optimal vision might get the experience. It is easy, sitting in a car in a dark rainstorm, to imagine you saw something over near the bushes.

Then most of the scenes get real explicit and obvious and while it is kind of cool how lines that seem a little throwaway are often explained better than you would expect, the dial of explanation is simply too high, and the chief bad guy does little to add to the best parts of the movie and does a whole lot to throw them off. If they went and remade it without the "real bad" and worked on the stalking angle some to make all three storylines more effectively fit together, could be a real good movie. As is, mostly Fair with good moments but at least not as Blech as I originally assumed at the 1/3 mark. What's weird is that, even with an almost overabundance of explanation, there are weird things left to the imagination at the end, and reading some comments on sites like IMDB.com would lead you to think this movie is a real head scratcher.³

How did Crackle impact this? Well, I don't know if Crackle is like this for every movie but about every 10 minutes, give or take, I would get a half minute advertisement. Not too bad, except very little care was given to properly cut into the movie at chapter-breaks, etc, so that you get scenes, say, of someone crying and tense music cut in half and their effect mostly lost. HAD I watched the movie without the interruptions, it seems like it would have been better, but I don't know. If Crackle was to 1) get more commercials so that you don't watch the same one over and over again per movie and 2) divide it up so there were only three or commercial breaks but each one had 3 or so commercials to it, then I might consider it more a go to channel on the Roku. As it is, I'm going to consider it a tier 2 or even tier 3 channel: one I check every now and then. Overall, picture quality high and sound quality good, no real glitches that detracted though got a couple of pixel jumps around the middle. For sure try it out, especially if you have a Roku box but aren't sure about paying to subscribe to other things since it is truly free and has some fair quality selections.

1: Even though some names get brought up passing, the characters are effectively unnamed. Instead, people regularly are named by only their profession—Priest, Cop—or their gender, as in the case of the central Girl and Guy.

2: It is easy to pick on the eel guy, especially when the overall effect ends up being one of the more wanky in the film. If you were to take away the reveal + eel, it actually would have worked fine already. This is the horror equivalent of someone adding another dash of a salt to an already perfectly fine concoction.

3: I have ROT13ed my partial explanation. If you want, go to my ROT13 page and input the rotated text below to decipher: Jung qb V guvax vf unccravat? V unir gjb gurbevrf. Gurer vf n pbzzba vagrecergngvba nobhg gur thl orvat n tubfg gur jubyr gvzr. V guvax guvf vf vapbeerpg. Jung V guvax vf tbvat ba vf gung gur thl vf yrtvgvzngryl n fgnyxre glcr jub unf hfrq Snprobbx/Zlfcnpr fglyr fbpvny nccf gb tngure vasb ba gur tvey bire n crevbq bs n frzrfgre (abg gbb uneq vs lbh qb guvatf yvxr ng cebsvyrf bs sevraqf naq ernq ure pbzzragf, rgp). Bapr gur jerpx, rvgure bar be gjb guvatf bpphef. Rvgure gur zbivr pbagvahrf NF gbyq, BE fur vf xabpxrq bhg naq pnhtug hc va n frevrf bs ybbcf. Vs vg pbagvahrf nf gbyq, gur rkcynangvba vf gung gur pbc jbhyq erthyneyl xvyy naq nggnpx naq crbcyr ba n juvz, gehpxvat gurz hc gb orvat "va gur anzr bs whfgvpr". N tebhc bs cevrfgf jub yvirq hc gur uvyy bar qnl fcbggrq uvz nggnpxvat naq cynaavat gb encr n jbzna. Riraghnyyl, gur pbc biregheaf uvf iruvpyr naq vf oheavat gb qrngu. Gur cevrfgf abg bayl qba'g fnir uvz, ohg pevccyr uvf enqvb. Ng fbzr cbvag va gvzr yngre, gur pbc pbzrf onpx naq xvyyf gur cevrfgf, nf jryy nf n ahzore bs bgure crbcyr nybat gung fgergpu bs ebnq. Uvf rivy entr oraqf ernyvgl nebhaq fb gung nggrzcgf gb yrnir oevat lbh onpx bire naq bire ntnva guebhtubhg gur avtug. Riraghnyyl, Tvey znxrf vg gb zbeavat naq vf noyr gb rfpncr. Vs fur jnf cnffrq bhg, nyy gung pbhyq or gehr naq oyrrqvat vagb ure pbafpvbhfarff, be vg pbhyq or gung fur znqr gur jubyr guvat hc naq ol gvzr fur jnxrf hc Thlf vf qrnq naq vg jnf nyy whfg n qernz. Va guvf fgbel, gur penml fgnyxre fgbelyvar pbhyq unir jrag nal ahzore bs jnlf naq vg vf cbffvoyr gung Thl jnf cynaavat ba xvyyvat ure.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: December 2011