Movie Review: 'Shortcut'

Shortcut is short and that's the best thing about this teen-centric horror movie. That's not to say that Shortcut is unwatchably bad, it's not. Shortcut is perfectly serviceable as a creature feature. If you like goofy monsters and lots of dark corners in which to shine torches and flashlights, Shortcut has you covered. If you are looking for genuine scares, you will want to look elsewhere.

Shortcut stars a ragtag group of teens including Jack Kane as Nolan, the ostensible leader of the group. Nolan's love interest is Queenie played by Molly Dew. Also in our disparate group is bad boy Reggie (Zak Sutcliffe), loudmouth Karl (Zander Emlano), and brainiac Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver), known to her friends as I.Q, because she's smart, in case you needed that desperately spelled out to you. She also wears glasses and dresses kind of nerdy in order to underline all the stereotypes.

Our protagonists are on a school outing with the only adult in the group being their bus driver, Joe (Terence Anderson). There is no indication what the kids were doing on this outing, only that there are five of them and they are on a bus. The bus is cool, it's a retro looking bus with rounded edges and a cool red paint job. I tend to take note of things like the design of a bus when the movie doesn't offer much else to contemplate.

The titular 'Shortcut' comes into play when the bus route is interrupted by large amounts of storm debris in the road. The only solution is a creepy dirt road that leads to a an even creepier, and little used, tunnel, adjacent to an abandoned and creepy military base. In the darkness of the tunnel the bus is stopped again for what looks like an animal in the road. It is a dead deer but it was placed in the road by the tongue eating serial killer Giullo Sarpi (Teo Achille Caprio) who uses the opportunity of the stopped bus to take everyone hostage.

Sarpi however, is not the big bad of Shortcut. This is a monster movie and so, when the bus breaks down and Sarpi's hostage taking is interrupted, Joe is forced to go out into the darkness and find out what is disrupting their travel plans. Naturally, it's a monster and the rest of the short runtime of Shortcut will involve darkness, running, breathing, crying and flashlights.

I must say, for a movie of modest budget, the monster in Shortcut isn't bad. It's not an iconic movie monster in any way but, given the restrictions of budget, and ambition, in Shortcut, it's not bad. I liked the design even if the screeching and skittering is incredibly derivative of dozens of other monsters in far better and far worse monster movies.

The nicest things that I can say about Shortcut is that it is short, under 80 minutes long, and, it could be far worse. Instead of being bland and derivative it could feature ugly and hateful characters ala so many mid-2000s teen horror movies. It could carry pretentious themes that the director batters you over the head with as became popular over the last several years in horror. I'm glad the movie isn't pretentious.

I guess that I am saying that I will take bland and derivative over something that is more actively bad. Shortcut has a particular affability in it's lack of ambition that helps me forgive some of the more egregious mediocrity in character and plot. The actors are fine, they're all under-written and rely on classically engrained character tropes to stand in as personalities but I didn't hate these characters so that's a plus.

When you see as many actively terrible horror movies as I do, something as mediocre as Shortcut tends to get a bit of a break from my criticism. It's not that I recommend you spend good hard-earned cash seeing something that is only passably good, but if you love horror movies, specifically monster movies, you could do worse than Shortcut.

Shortcut is opening in limited release in theaters across the country on Friday, September 25th.