Shudder (2001)

Reviewed on May 23, 2001 under Horror |

Produced and directed by Ryan Cavalline
Written by Ronald Damien Malfi and Dominic Guerieri
Starring
- Angie Guido
- Vic Badger
- Rose Woelfel
- Jeremy Stratton

I really wanted to like this movie.

I’ve previously reviewed the anthology movie 3 Evil Tales from no-budget moviemaker Ryan Cavalline, and I remarked at the time that I’d like to see him tackle a full-length feature; he has an unpracticed talent for camera work that makes the almost plotless third segment of that anthology become the most enjoyable. Well, my wish is fulfilled, and I feel… not quite satisfied.

This is Erica’s younger brother Billy. Excuse him if he doesn’t shake hands.

Our setting is a house into which three student boarders are moving over the Christmas vacation: Travis (Jeremy Stratton), an ex-high school athlete; Jaycen (Rose Woelfel), who’s got this whole rebellion thing going, and Erica (Angie Guido), a zoftig blonde with secrets in her closet. Together with their goateed host Chris (Vic Badger), they have no one to really spend time with over the next several days, and thus proceed to get on each other’s nerves, discovering each other’s quirks and pet peeves. Erica, though, goes a little farther than “squeezing the toothpaste” obsessions; she has a scrapbook of clippings regarding a series of serial killings, of which (we eventually find out) her own family was one: She came home one day to find her parents dead and her brother carved up and traumatized enough to be fit only for the asylum.

But now, someone’s leaving flowers for Erica on the front doorstep. And a package of letters she wrote to her institutionalized brother before he committed suicide. She has both sleeping and waking dreams of her brother, shot in ghastly distorted colors, lying on the linoleum with a puddle of blood under his mutilated hand, his lips moving soundlessly. And she starts to see other things too…

“Here’s my scrapbook full of serial killer newspaper clippings, and — oh hey! Tuna, two for 89¢!”

The killer supposedly confessed and was caught, but is the real serial killer still free? Or is Erica losing her mind? Or is there another possible explanation?

It’s a short movie (clocking in at about an hour), and much of the time is filled with character interactions which don’t amount to much; it seems everyone gets a big character moment, then is left alone for the rest of the running time. Travis has this whole scene about how he earned his father’s disapproval for breaking his leg in a crucial football game; Chris is revealed to have a nasty peeping habit; Jaycen seems to define herself by how much she can gently torment Erica. But there are some good ideas in the script, and the suspense of the story actually builds forward toward an explanatory conclusion, rather than just being generically spooky (which usually translates as being not spooky at all).

So why the dissatisfaction on my part? Simply put, the visuals don’t help the script. On the one hand, there are the expected technical problems of shooting with prosumer video equipment: colors that wash out and lose contrast, jerky pans and zooms, rough transitions that look like the camera was just turned off. But on the other, the story we see doesn’t emphasize the story we hear. There are a couple of well-constructed visual images: A strange overlapping image in a snowy cemetery, Erica’s maybe-hallucination of a man in white with a black hood trudging out of the trees, and the afore-mentioned dream sequence — the latter being the strongest image in the whole movie, but even that is used so many times that it loses impact through exposure. And everything else is shot very lackluster, with a bare minimum of editing. Whole conversations are shot in one take, with the camera panning back and forth between conversants and not even keeping up, as if the cameraman hadn’t read the script (not the case, I know, as Cavalline was the principal cameraman).

“My apologies, Madam; I understood that you wanted your steak ‘rare.’”

I think that most of these problems stem from the fact that this is the first project in which Cavalline didn’t write his own script. If I were to go out on a limb, I’d wager that his earlier projects were built around images he wanted to film (an origin that lends itself well to anthology films). In this case, though, he didn’t come into it from the intended image, he started with the word on the page and worked to the image. It’s a different skill, and it shows.

Add to this some actors who are often less than completely enthusiastic, a few too many line flubs that were left in, and a sound mix that relies too much on location sound (there are scenes in which every rustle of paper is recorded, to the detriment of the actor’s voice), and you end up with a seriously flawed movie with a nifty idea at the center.

“It’s the wallpaper! The wallpaper! It’s making me crazy, see?!”

I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m beating up on Ryan, because I’m not trying to. For a self-taught filmmaker, he’s done some impressive things with the resources he’s had. The longer feature format is as different from the short film as short stories are from novels. Shudder is most valuable not as a finished feature itself, but as a warm-up and water-tester for his next one, which should really shine.