Zero Christmas chill

Uh-oh. A Christmas-set scary movie, released in the height of sunny summer? Surely that's a sign more ominous than Jack Nicholson just popping round to ask if he can borrow an axe. This is your basic 'is he a psycho or isn't he?' movie with a tacked-on 'past won't stay buried' twist, and stars Emily Blunt as an up-herself student who accepts a ride home from college with a nerdy and adoring classmate (Ashton Holmes).

Trouble is they end up crashed on a snowbound country road, in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere (though sadly not far enough away from us), with a lot of bald, undead men in dresses lurking in the hills. Quel bummer.

Succeeding neither as a ghost story nor as a relationship thriller, this is as clunky as it is emotionally unconvincing. As for suspense - I've opened scarier advent calendars. The leads try their best but their characters are so annoyingly thin and dislikeable you want to hit them over the head and feed them to the nearest reindeer.

Wind Chill
Cert: 15