It might be the year that saw Sinners raise hell over Easter and Weapons target the late summer but this Halloween, the options are scarily poor in comparison, no tricks or treats, just junk. Last week’s Elm Street-cribbing sequel Black Phone 2 was a sign of a franchise already running out of steam while this week, low-budget disappointment Shelby Oaks tries and fails to start a new one, a scrappy attempt to conjure the clammy fear of The Blair Witch Project, a film that has so far proved impossible to replicate (horror fans would be far better served by making the most of the Sinners Imax re-release).
It’s the debut of the YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, who premiered his Kickstarter-funded feature at last year’s genre-led Fantasia festival, attracting the attention of Neon, a company who had just achieved surprise success with the serial killer horror Longlegs. In an unusual move, they gave Stuckmann extra budget to refine, and reportedly add more gore, before they packaged it up, with another trademark drip-feed marketing campaign, as this year’s must-see film for Halloween. But there is no amount of late-stage patchwork that can hide what still feels awkwardly unfinished, a cheaply cobbled together head-scratcher that really doesn’t feel ready for a wide theatrical release. This weekend, expect refunds …
Given Stuckmann’s background, it is no surprise that he’s more comfortable with capturing the online world, and it’s in the opening stretch that the film works slightly better, as a mockumentary sets up the sorry tale of the Paranormal Paranoids, a group of online investigators led by Riley (Sarah Durn). She disappeared years prior and older sister Mia (Camille Sullivan, too overwrought) has been obsessed with finding her ever since. It’s a derivative introduction, set in the late 2000s and resembling many of the found-footage hits of the era, but it’s a mode that Stuckmann probably should have stayed in, with the more cinematic and style-reliant, real-world narrative that follows proving far trickier.
Mia’s search for her sister just never sweeps us along, a remarkably flat and uninvolving trek, led by clues left on a tape that might as well say The Ring on it but has the words Shelby Oaks instead, pointing to a ghost town that was once populated by a theme park. It’s hard to care about what she will find and where she will find it, and even though the film is over before the 80-minute mark is even hit, the search feels boringly endless (the only bright spot is a fun, against-type opportunity for character actor Robin Bartlett). Stuckmann desperately throws it all at the wall from broader genre tropes to films he’s riffing on, a predictable strategy from someone on record as a genre enthusiast. But it never comes together or manages to feel like something of its own, the cliched work of someone who hasn’t found his own voice yet and hopes that imitating others will be enough.
It’s a stark contrast from the recent work of another YouTube creator Curry Barker, whose first full-length feature Obsession premiered at September’s Toronto film festival. It was a horror film made on an even smaller budget of just $1m, but it was the clear arrival of someone who actually belongs outside the restrictions of the smartphone, made with real swagger and style, a smooth transfer of skillset from one world to the other (there’s a reason Focus picked it up for a whopping $15m). Shelby Oaks is embarrassingly underbaked and out of place in comparison, an incomplete half-attempt that should never have found its way to a screen that can’t be held in your hand. As Stuckmann lumbers toward an ending, it’s clear that not only will he not stick the landing but that he is heading for a crash, a finale of rushed incoherence that makes little to no sense and will probably lead to the wrong kind of boos this Halloween.
Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.
