The directorial debut from actor Sung Kang is a humorless, cheap horror-comedy lacking in imagination. Our Shaky Shivers review:
is a horror-comedy so hacky it’d make any self-respecting ax murderer hang up his hatchet. Written by Andrew McAllister and Aaron Strongoni, who boast long showbiz resumes and, in the latter’s case at least, a familiarity penning silly horror schlock like, this cheap two-hander barrels through its bad jokes and horror tropes like it knows it won’t survive the night.
Maybe he lost a bet, where he had to make a movie satisfying a bingo card’s worth of recognizable genre material—but with the added challenge of forging the connective tissue out of rejectedjokes. There certainly seems to be some sort of ulterior meta-motive as we follow ice cream shopworker Lucy , who thinks she’s going to turn into a werewolf. She and her friend Karen drive out to an abandoned summer camp to wait things out—and sloppily check every horror box while they do so.
Bigfoots, zombies, werewolves, backfiring spells, masked cultists, mysterious witches doling out curses, undue horniness—squanders them all as it lazily considers each, like an ancient fussbudget comparing soup cans at the grocery store. And the movie still feels empty. Like a lot of no-cash indies that don’t have much going on,kills time with lots of B-roll footage. Cars pulling up, going around corners, cruising down the road. Vehicular filler. Nothing improves once these cars arrive.
That desperately stretched runtime—combined with the cartoonish performances, repeated jokes and Timo Chen’s overbearing, hokey score that comes in at inopportune moments—makes you think that it’s a satirical genre primer that erroneously believes that kids are simple. ButThe profanity and uncomfortable sex jokes garnishing the bland tedium’s sub-sitcom punchlines taint-lover’s time-killer. And when the material is ostensibly all-ages, you wish nobody had to hear it.
This off-putting humor is mostly but not entirely the fault of McAllister and Strongoni’s screenplay. The right, rhythmic editing can make even the worst script move like a spry comedy. A slow, ogling camera can leave even the best performers out to dry.can’t even clap on the ones and threes. Nguyen gets blood barfed up all over her face? Cutting on her scream as she realizes her predicament would be a lot more effective than letting the moment play out, her yell fading to a soft, sad whimper.