Posted: 12/11/2007

The Windy City Incident

(2005)

by D. B. Bates

What follows is the synopsis provided by Ariztical Entertainment, distributors of The Windy City Incident:

Chanel Puget resides in peaceful Olympia, Washington, and is frequently haunted by ghostly dreams. One evening, Chanel has a vivid dream and is “ordered” to travel to Chicago. Despite continual pressure from his boyfriend of two months (Randy), Chanel follows the message in his dreams and heads for Chicago, the “windy city.” Upon his arrival, Chanel wastes no time supporting his rent and daily expenses by hustling on the streets. One evening while visiting a drag bar, Chanel’s past history collides with the present. Mysteries begin to unravel as it becomes apparent that Chanel’s body and soul have become a vehicle for ghastly and vindictive apparitions. Only the viewer knows if Chanel will safely and sanely make it back to his home in Olympia, or be possessed forever in Chicago by the dreaded ghost, known as “Ant.”

What I received, instead, was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a shitload of bad movies.

I’m going to be nice and start with the editing, because it’s a huge problem that is easily fixed, all things considered. This shit needs to be tightened up. I imagine the editing is so poor because, at 71 minutes, The Windy City Incident is barely feature-length. Yet, every single shot in this entire movie starts three seconds too soon and lingers at least three seconds too long. It gives the entire movie the pacing of a bad 1970s melodrama.

This problem is most noticeable in the dialogue scenes, where, for some reason that I can only assume is a private joke, an adult male coos like a baby on the soundtrack to punctuate jokes that probably wouldn’t be funny even if the editing were tightened. But let’s pretend this is a film that can be saved. Get rid of the cooing, obviously, and make it appear as if each character is interacting with one another. The goal is to create the illusion that something one person says inspires the next person to speak. Instead, we are treated to shot after shot of actors staring off into space for far too long before delivering their lines.

On the subject of acting, I don’t want to denigrate the cast too much, but it reaches a point where it’s difficult not to. In many scenes, it’s abundantly clear that actors are either reading from cue cards or having lines fed to them by somebody offscreen. You’re shooting on videotape, and these are the best performances that could be culled from these actors? It’d be one thing if this had been shot on film, where every single frame is precious and expensive, but video? You could keep that shit rolling for hours until you get it right. I have my doubts that shooting time was limited by usual factors like lighting, costuming, set decoration (seriously, every set in this movie looks like a dorm room, a boiler room in an abandoned warehouse, or the director’s parents’ house), and sound recording, so why not spend time letting actors rehearse their lines? Or learn them?

With great difficulty, I tried to remove the story/dialogue aspects from the atrocious performances and the goofy pacing. I tried to objectively say whether or not this story would fly if it had been created by a group of competent individuals. Perhaps if the film had been written by the marketing team at Ariztical, we could have had a winner on our hands. Unfortunately, the movie we have plays like a series of loosely connected sketches that aren’t funny, interspersed with sex scenes as awkward and dispassionate as HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me, only more random and less relevant to the skimpy plot.

So what is this? A chance for some friends to fuck around with a camera they bought for $99 at Circuit City and edited in Windows Movie Maker? An opportunity for a sleazy director to tape a variety of starving-actor erections under the guise of making a “comedy”? I tried looking to the audio commentary for answers. In the two minutes I watched before shutting it off in disgust, all I heard was the lip-smacking of two men impolitely eating fast-food and making limp inside-jokes and giggling without letting the audience in on their “creative process.”

Maybe a braver soul will find this DVD and unlock the mysteries of why anybody would make a film like The Windy City Incident, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

D. B. Bates doesn’t hate bad movies so long as they’re entertaining and/or passionate.

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