Chillicothe celebrates its 10th anniversary.

Cory Edwards, now best known as the director of Hoodwinked! (2005) and the upcoming Fraggle Rock movie, notes that this month marks the 10th anniversary of his first movie, Chillicothe (1999), which he co-produced and co-starred in. (It was written and directed by his brother Todd, who also co-stars.)

I happened to see the film three years ago, as I was preparing to interview Edwards for CT Movies, and I liked it quite a bit. I started writing a blog post on the film, but for some reason put it on hold — so this seems like as good a time as any to polish it off and get it out there:

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I finally watched Chillicothe, the late-blooming Gen-X romantic comedy directed by Todd Edwards and co-starring Todd and his brother Cory, among others.

Wow. My former roomates and I used to talk all the time about making a movie about “the Hoy House” — the place where I lived with several men and women, many of them from church, four of whom paired off and got married, in the early ’90s — but of course, we never got around to it.

The makers of Chillicothe, on the other hand, did get around to it, and it’s definitely one of the sturdier independent movies out there — all the more so for having been made with what seems to be next-to-no industry input. There’s a nice mix of characters (a few of them apparently fictionalized versions of the actors playing them); the drama and the humour are quite believable, with a few noteworthy exceptions (couch potato Shane’s scream when his cable is cut off is a rare moment of over-the-top genre parody); there are some creative montages (especially when everyone hears about the guy who died — and yes, I did notice him in the background of at least one of those slides!); there are some interesting reversals and developments (like when one scene underscores a man’s frustration with a telemarketer, and then he ends up becoming one himself); and there are probably some other good things I could point to, if I had been taking notes.

There is also a remarkable “church presence” in some scenes, just enough to let you know that it is a part of these characters’ lives but not so much that it becomes overbearingly thematically significant. (And, hmmm, I wonder if this is why the characters never seem to move in with someone before marrying her — or did I blink and miss something? At any rate, when my ex-roomies and I talked about doing the “Hoy House” movie, one qualm that always lurked at the back of my mind was how we would deal with the matter-of-fact presence of the church in our lives without doing it in a way that would alienate audience members outside that subculture.)

Trivia note re: possible in-joke: My editors at CT Movies linked my review of Hoodwinked! to a website featuring some video clips of Cory Edwards doing his stand-up routine, and one of the first clips concerns his sister Katie, who married a guy named Hooten, and now Cory can’t get used to saying “Katie Hooten” without thinking it’s some kind of Amish slang. And so, after seeing that video clip, I popped in the Chillicothe DVD, and wouldn’t you know it, but during the opening-credits montage, as the name “Katie Hooten” popped up, it appeared (with a few other names) over an image of two Amish farmers.

For what it’s worth, Todd, who took a slight step back from the writer-director role and became “co-director” on Hoodwinked!, looks to me like a cross between Nicolas Cage and Jake Gyllenhaal, and Cory, the primary “director” on Hoodwinked!, bears very little resemblance to him; at least, I can’t imagine who I’d compare him to. And there’s a bonus feature on the DVD where Cory says he hated wearing long hair for this role, and he says he was actually mistaken for a woman while the movie was in production.

In that same bonus feature, there are also some fun outtakes from the Edwards’ brothers’ Super-8 home-movies — Indiana Jones-style adventures, fairy tales, etc. — which they shot when they were just kids.

The film was made in 1999, but the soundtrack credits include a few songs that are copyrighted 2001, the year the film came out on DVD. Also, one of them is by Benjy Gaither, who plays Japeth the singing goat in Hoodwinked!.

The movie does have a small smattering of “bad words”, and since more than two of them begin with F, the movie is rated R in the United States. But I’ve seen much, much worse at church.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t take seven years for the Edwards’ brothers’ next film to be made.