Review: "Shelby Oaks"

Over the 36 years I’ve been reviewing movies, I can honestly say that I almost never walk out of a screening.  I’m an optimist.  I always allow for the fact that even the worst movie might somehow find its footing and have some redeeming value that would justify the investment of several hours of my finite mortal existence.

I walked out of Shelby Oaks.

In my defense, I gave it 15 or 20 minutes before pulling the plug. 

I remember a nugget of wisdom from a film workshop or seminar that I addended many years ago that essentially said that, as a filmmaker, if you didn’t hook the audience the audience in the opening reel of the film, you were fighting a losing battle. I believe that’s true. 

Great movies connect with the audience in the first ten minutes.  They introduce the characters, set up the plot and make you want to watch.  It’s that simple.

It’s what didn’t happen in the supernatural horror flick Shelby Oaks, another rehashing of the 1999 super hit The Blair Witch Project.  That movie was made on a reported budget somewhere between $35,000 to $60,000 and went on to make an estimated $248 million.  It is the most profitable movie of all time in terms of return on investment.

Not surprisingly, everyone has been trying to replicate the movie’s success over the years by cranking out the same bare-bones story made on a shoestring, indie film budget.  So far, it hasn’t happened.

Blair Witch cashed in on the premise that the story was real.  It was pitched as a film made from actual recovered documentary footage of a group of teens who went missing after doing some scary paranormal investigating.  The story wasn’t real, but the filmmakers managed to make audiences believe that it was.

Once again, in Shelby Oaks, we have a small group of young paranormal investigators who mysteriously disappear, leaving behind some terrifyingly creepy handycam video footage.  We’ve seen it before.

Early in the film, there is a shocking scene of a man putting a gun to his head, but the story is otherwise stuck in spin cycle, featuring characters delivering sluggish dialog while filmed in dark, woefully bad lighting. The writing and acting are marginal at best.

Shelby Oaks’ director is Chris Stuckmann, a young director who grew up making home movie projects with his friends.  All aspiring directors try to replicate Steven Spielberg’s similar attraction to film and rise to fame.  The difference is that Spielberg has genius-level talent to back up his burning childhood ambition. 

Spielberg was a director who went on to make major motion pictures.  Stuckmann was a YouTube movie critic now making his feature film debut. 

Spielberg’s movies were fresh and original.  Stuckmann’s fright flick is only derivative, at best.  It doesn’t even qualify as a serious homage.

Interestingly, a very similar movie entitled House on Eden was released a few months ago.  It was also a Blair Witch wannabe horror film from an internet sensation and Tik Tok star (Kris Collins) who lacked the filmmaking background to do anything more than mix the basic storyline of Blair Witch Project with the climactic ending of the 2015 movie The Witch, starring a young Anya Taylor-Joy.

We live in an age when internet stars with mega-followers are venturing into the world of feature film cinema to try to make their mark.  They know that horror is currently hot at the box office.  Coincidentally, both filmmakers believed that a low budget reworking of Blair Witch would be a shortcut, surefire path to success.

It wasn’t.  In either case.

Shelby Oaks is rated R.