Review: The Anniversary at Shallow Creek (2011)

"Shallow is an apt word to describe this slasher flick..."

The movie opens with some retarded twit dancing around in her underwear, which pisses me off because how am I supposed to get a non-blurry shot of her ass if she keeps moving?

You may think it's easy to get good screenshots to write film reviews, but I'm here to tell you that it is not!

Anywho... When her gimpy boyfriend shows up and tries to get in her pants, she says "we've got all night!" a few times, and shines him on. Turns out they don't have all night, because he takes one in the head and she mercifully gets stabbed to death. Mercifully for us, I mean.

And yes, I'm really bitter about the whole blurry ass-shot thing.

Hold still, dummy!

For the next 40 minutes, we're treated to a bunch of inane characters spouting inane dialogue while doing inane things. The plot doesn't matter, it only serves to get a group of morons to a secluded cabin in the middle of BFE (per usual) so that they can be picked off one by one. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in this movie it isn't totally awful...

The problem is that so much nothing happens before something actually happens, that when something does finally happen, we're left wishing something else would have happened. I hope you followed all of that. I got lost after the 3rd "happen" myself.

Nah, don't get naked.... this is effing Shakespeare we're doing here, right?

Shallow Creek definitely follows the Slasher movie blueprint, but it varies a bit, mainly in the fact that the killer uses a sniper rifle for many of his kills. To us, that was both odd and interesting; many of the movie's best kills were via gun, but it made the whole thing feel less creepy. Kinda. At least the whole gun thing made for a few bloody good moments.

You've got the right idea babe, but that blood totally kills the mood.

There's no way you don't figure out what's going on in this movie before too long either. There's a twist or two that occur that are kinda obvious, although when they happen they aren't played in an overtly dramatic fashion,as most twists tend to be. They just happen, so I'll give some props for that.

I also have to give the movie this; the way the killer creeped around was kinda cool. Some of the parts in the house were creepy, and there were very few jump scares. So, kudos for all of that.

Ooh creepy. Now kill her, she's annoying.

This is another one of those movies where you really could care less about the characters or what happens to them, and maybe that's because the acting wasn't so great (it wasn't so horrible either.) Maybe the story wasn't so great either. Or the dialogue. Alright, so not much about the movie was great. The worst part of all? The ending. Endings, actually.

Yeah, it's not even close to over yet.

As if the shaky, 20 minute shot of our final girl running down a dirt road wasn't ending enough, there's a sequence after that which felt really cheesy. Without spoiling anything, it came down to a lot of "explain-y" dialogue and an equal amount of over-acting. It really killed any tension that the movie had managed to build up to that point, which wasn't a ton to begin with. The last shot of the movie was the worst of all. I get what they were going for, but it felt more kitschy than foreboding.

For a minute there, we thought this horse was eying up that chick for some crazy horse-rape... but neigh.

You could see that the filmmakers put a lot of heart into this movie, but it's all rather flat, despite their best efforts. There's some tension to be had in places, some interesting ideas too, but with so little gore, failing to utilize the hot chicks for some gratuitous boob-age, and so many Slasher cliche's abound, there's not much here to love, or recommend. If you aren't too picky, you may have fun with it. We are very picky, so, no fun for us.

D

Not only is she a cutie-puss, but Brianna Lee Johnson also produce movies. Who knew? Also, Anne Burgstede.