Title: Shelby Oaks
MPA Rating: R
Director: Chris Stuckmann
Starring: Sarah Durn, Mason Heidger, Joe Quinn
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins

What It Is: Riley (Durn) is a paranormal investigator—and she’s missing, along with her fellow ghost hunters. Her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), has never given up on trying to find her, even though the police have. When a man delivers a videotape to Mia—then immediately kills himself on her porch—the mystery of Riley’s disappearance becomes even more suspicious. Where did she go? Is she still alive? Mia won’t stop searching for answers, no matter how dark they may be.

What We Think: This is a pretty bad movie. I know I’m supposed to be praising it because it was written by former film “critic” Chris Stuckmann. But here’s the thing: he’s not François Truffaut, and this sure as hell isn’t The 400 Blows. So, no—I’m not going to do that. I’m going to be honest. Writing is not his strong suit. This film suffers from a lethal dose of bad writing.

I can respect that Stuckmann and his wife, Sam Liz, tried to write a movie. It’s just unfortunate that they couldn’t do so without wearing their inspirations right on their sleeves. The tropes here are not just familiar—they’re exhausted. There’s even a segment where the CGI is, to put it kindly, negligible. And then there’s the ending. What the actual fuck was that? There’s “bad,” and then there’s offensively bad, and this ending is the latter. It feels like the writer assumes the audience are idiots. That might work for some—it didn’t work for me.

Our Grade: D+, I commend Stuckmann for trying to make something like this. What I don’t like are the biased reviews floating around—people clout-chasing because they “watched him growing up” or are his friends. I don’t know the guy. I met him once; he seemed uninterested in conversation. That’s fine. What’s not fine is reviewers pulling their punches because they “like the guy.” I don’t know him—but I do know he wrote a bad script and doesn’t have the film making chops to make up for it.