The found footage is scarier than the rest of this movie.
“Shelby Oaks” opens as a splice between a found footage movie and mockumentary, as Riley Brennan, the host of the YouTube channel Paranormal Paranoids, disappeared in 2008 along with her murdered friends and co-hosts (Eric Francis Melaragni as David, Anthony Baldasare as Peter, and Caisey Cole as Laura), while looking for an abandoned town named Shelby Oaks. Hence the title. Her sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) has been looking for her ever since.
If you didn’t see the trailer for this horror movie, you might think it will play like a “Blair Witch Project” knockoff for the rest of the film. And it looks scary enough for my tastes, especially with how the old video camera film them, but then it turns into a conventional horror movie and begins to lose our interests. In fact, it’s rather boring and derivative.
Mia acknowledges that Riley has been having nightmares since she was a kid and drawing pictures of what she believes she has seen. While her YouTube channel has sparked views, it also sparked nonbelievers, who all think that she and her friends are staging the paranormal activity. But she knows her sister is better than that.
The small cast also includes Brendan Saxton III as Mia’s husband Robert, the second horror movie husband I’ve seen this week to think his wife is crazy after the remake of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.” There’s also Michael Beach as the detective Burke, who barely has any leads. Keith David plays a prison warden named Morton Jacobson, who tells her about the escape convict she came across before his suicide-Wilson Miles (Charlie Talbert). And Robin Bartlett plays an old Shelby Oaks resident Norma, who is, obviously, the film’s creepy old lady.
And the dark special effects (which means we have to see them in the dark if great visuals aren’t in its small budget) contains some dogs and some strange creatures. And all of them have something to do with the Paranormal Paranoids’ disappearance and murder. At the very least, I appreciate the atmosphere of an abandoned jail that Mia investigates, because of its dark and creepy appearance. Aren’t abandoned places the best creepy places to discover?
“Shelby Oaks” was written and directed by the YouTuber and film critic Chris Stuckmann, who was inspired by the series of fake paranormal investigators known as the Paranormal Paranoids, as well as his sister being shunned from Jehovah’s Witness. There’s a video playlist of them on the website from 4 years ago. I’m sure we get many of these kinds of videos before with people saying they’re fake, and we’re still going to get these kinds of videos. If this is a real channel regarding these fake paranormal investigators, then maybe the film should be more interesting than what it is.
Half of the film looks and feels creepy thanks to its found footage and mockumentary intro, while the other half is routine, sometimes predictable, and has the obligatory stupid decision rule. And that comes at the end of the movie. Is it supposed to make sense to what the Hell is happening or it is really a rule? You decide. Either way, I stopped caring.
There’s a better horror movie on a smaller scale in select theaters called “Good Boy,” which is told from the perspective of the dog and has better interests than “Shelby Oaks.” If you missed that in theaters, then maybe it will be on VOD soon. I was thinking maybe I could like this movie, because of the poster, its distributor NEON, and the fact that Mike Flanagan is an executive producer. But this one wasn’t for me.
