Review: SHELBY OAKS

A group of online paranormal investigators meet disaster on their final assignment at an abandoned prison. All but one of their bodies is found, leading the sister of the missing woman to start her own investigation. After a bombarding montage of the case a violent incident sees the film itself change from a found footage with interviews mockumentary (like Lake Mungo or Horror in the High Desert) into a much slicker conventional feature film. That's about twenty minutes in. It's so smooth a change that revealing it does not constitute a spoiler. It's more a soft serve bait and switch. Apart from some extra video footage soon after the turn, this is now a normal mainstream movie.

That was the main gripe of audiences who have responded against the film, it felt dishonest. The other gripe is a tall poppy cull. The writer/director Chris Stuckmann has spent years creating a lot of good will as a YouTube film critic, offering solid appraisals of the titles he reports on, whether good orf bad. That changed in the last few years as people were noticing his reviews were almost entirely positive. He addressed this in a video, saying he was fed up trash talking film makers, omitting the word other and then this feature film appeared. 

Personally, I don't care about that nor care for tall poppyism. Is the movie any good? Well, that's the sticking point: it isn't. Charges of over derivation are meaningless in a genre film, all of them come from a tradition that is recognisable; it's part of why we like them. Shelby Oaks is not a good horror film because it never feels quite right.

But what is a budding filmmaker to do, offer up yet another found footage fest after deacdes of them? Why not, if he's good enough at it? I think the problem lies in how the bulk of the running time doesn't match the promise of the opening montage and first act where Mia's action is sparked and the hunt is on. It doesn't play convincingly as a conventional film because audiences are throwing popcorn at the screen by the time Mia decides on a whim to investigate the freezingly creepy prison by herself at the witching hour. No justification given, she's set on it and does it. This is not the story killing argument of why the kids in the Evil Dead cabin don't just turn around and go back to town. Mia could easily have waited, asked her husband to come along and do it by the light of day. It's almost as if someone is saying: aw come one, you want to know, too? Sure we do, but you could have made a daylight trip a lot scarier than the cliche one.

On cliche, the house in the woods we do get to only ever feels fake with black mould that looks art directed rather than organic, a CG hell hound that never quite works, and the kind of nasty hick monster that Barbarian already did in a game changing way years before (and with refreshing complexity). The remainder of the tale drags its points so agonisingly that the audience is already at the finishing gate by the time of the final shot. 

I'm not here to trash talk a good critic but rather to sadly admit that not all of the YouTube brats come through with a Talk ro Me or an Obsession, nor do all the talented streamer filmmakers break through (Isaac Rodriguez, anyone?) Stuckmann's high profile on online outlets just gave him further to fall and, as far as this film has gone, the fall has lingered and the landing must have been painful. I will admit to wincing when I saw the credit of Mike Flanagan in a production role. I like him as a cine-thinker but have only found his work trope ridden and unimpressive. Is this the same operation as the final moment of Paranormal Activity that was so goofy it all but erased the good scares of the rest of the filim? Id it why Poltergeist looked and felt more like Spielberg than Tobe Hooper? I don't know. I will say that there is just enough here to warrant another chance. Just enough.