Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
Shelby Oaks
Writer/Director: Chris Stuckmann
Horror movie junkies like me have different moods that dictate what we want to watch. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a faux-documentary. Found footage hasn’t yet worn out its welcome, apparently, so, sure, one of those can be fun every so often. Sometimes a missing person yarn is just what the horror-doctor ordered. Sometimes you want to watch a group of ghost hunters get picked off one by one. Other times you want a tale about a demon wreaking red-eyed havoc. Or, one of my favorites, a movie about occult rituals. Ooh, sometimes a ghost-town story is good. Or what about an abandoned amusement park? Spooky! Rarely, but sometimes, you might even want a prison-horror piece.
Shelby Oaks wants to be the movie for all of these moods, and instead is overstuffed, like a turkey bursting at the seams with a variety of different, incompatible kinds of stuffing.
The faux-doc premise, in which a woman named Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan) is interviewed about her missing sister Riley (Sarah Durn), part of a group of ghost-hunters with a popular YouTube show called Paranormal Paranoids, is unceremoniously abandoned after the late-arriving opening credits. Maybe a good move, because in this day of a proliferation—maybe even a glut—of documentaries and documentary series, it doesn’t take a keen eye to pick out the wrong kind of acting. By which I mean dramatic “movie” acting when the scene calls for naturalistic acting that might easily be mistaken for a real person uncomfortable in front of a camera. If you like the documentary aspect, worry not, for it reappears for maybe one full minute somewhere in the last third of the movie.
Anyway, a fella shows up at Mia’s door, says “She finally let me go,” and shoots himself in the head. He has a tape with him to augment what we’ve already seen Mia look at in the Paranormal Paranoids footage, this one showing the killing of the co-hosts. It transpires that the man is a former prisoner, Mia does some research at the library using, I think, microfiche (throwback!) and then finds a book about occult rituals which the filmmakers purport will provide the necessary information to help us figure out what exactly is going on. Upon going to the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks to investigate, Mia finds a house in the woods in which a creepy old lady named Norma lives.
Bingo! Mia unadvisedly descends into a basement labyrinth in which she finds the disheveled Riley…with a baby. Norma, the mother of the suicided prison inmate, intervenes in the rescue attempt and performs a quick ritual with the baby. The demon Tarion, whose name was in the prison cell and in the occult book, makes a cameo appearance. Mia brings her sister home and, despite her muteness and odd affects, leaves Riley alone with the baby, and Riley tries her hand at infanticide.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. Shelby Oaks isn’t necessarily awful all around, it’s just too reminiscent of a hundred other movies. The performances are adequate and the screenplay does the heavy lifting. Let’s just add that there are hell hounds, in case you’re in the mood for hell hounds on top of everything else, and leave it at that.
