Shudder Saturday: Shortcut (2020)

Director Alessio Liguori and writer Daniele Cosci have worked together on a number of projects over the years and the one thing I took away from Shortcut is that they should maybe try going their separate ways. This is a bad film in almost every aspect, but it's all built around a particularly weak and dull script.

A bunch of teenagers are on a bus. That's the start of the movie. That bus is going through an area commonly referred to by us normal people as "the arse end of nowhere". Things become eventful when a dangerous criminal gets on the bus, causing some fear and panic among the teens, and then it transpires that there's also a dangerous creature dwelling in the darkness around them, forcing the children to hide in some tunnel areas as they figure out how to fight back and survive the night. Imagine Creep (2004), but rubbish.

I had so many choices this week, and I chose very poorly. I admit that I went for this based on the relatively short runtime ahead of anything else I knew about the film. Having said that though, there didn't seem to be anything here that would be awful. The premise was intriguing enough, and I am happy to watch something that does enough to make up for a variety of limitations. This did not manage to do that, and things went from bad to worse after an opening sequence that introduced viewers to a variety of characters it was difficult to care about.

The teens here are played by Jack Kane, Zanda Emlano, Zak Sutcliffe, Sophie Jane Oliver, and Molly Dew, and none of them are able to improve upon the weak writing that keeps them barely indistinguihsable from one another, aside from some being male and some being female. The only one who almost stands out is Dew, but that's because her character is singled out by others from the start for her apparent intelligence, which she reacts to with the right amount of eye-rolling and embracing of what is clearly supposed to be her defining trait.

Are there some nice shots here and there? Yes. Lighting levels could have been a lot worse, the creature design isn't bad, and some care has been taken to try and ensure that viewers have a good sense of the geography of people and places throughout the second act, when things move away from the confines of the bus. But I can't help thinking that a better team wouldn't have needed to move too far away from the bus in the first place. Turning that negative into a positive could have turned this into a very good little movie, instead of something that feels like a clumsy creature feature hampered by a lack of investment, in both money and the right talent.

One to avoid. There's no tension, no decent onscreen carnage, and nobody that you end up truly rooting for as the characters try to survive until the end credits. And I can't tell you how loudly I groaned, actually groaned, as the end of the film had characters reiterating and solving a lengthy riddle that had been set for them near the start of the film. It was shoehorned in, a literary device that didn't ring true after everything that they'd just gone through, and really underlined how weak the script was as I waited for the whole thing to just finally end.

3/10

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