| Product: |
Shallow Ground (DVD) |
| Date: |
23.12.06 (220 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Moody, suspenseful and intriguing
Disadvantages: The ending lets it down.
Shallow Ground is a horror that harkens back to the late 70’s and 80’s in more than just name and look. Unlike the recent throwbacks and remakes (House of Wax, Cabin Fever) it builds its horror through suspense and tension rather than blood and deaths. This is the kind of horror that I like, and I am not a great horror fan at all, one where the horror the horror side s not shown completely on screen but is left to your own imagination to decide what is going on off screen.
The set up for Shallow Ground is a small community in rural America, seemingly closing down. The sheriff’s station, on the edge of a forest, is in its final hour. Nearly everything is packed and jammed into the back of one of the two vehicles. The only people there are the deputy sheriff, the only officer and a drunk in a cell. The sheriff not having turned up yet, though he soon gets an emergency call from the station when a naked boy walks in, covered in blood, literally dripping off him, and holding a large knife, also drenched in blood. Whether it is his own, a victims, an animals or something else entirely is what the Police are going to have to investigate in their final hours of employment.
When Sheriff Jack Shepherd arrives his first thought is that this boy is the killer he has been searching for for ages. He is haunted by his failure to save a young, half naked, local girl, dangling in the forest a year ago. He found her alive but his search for her killer left her at the mercy of the person he was hunting, and they came back first!
This boy though doesn’t respond to interrogation, seems to seep blood from every pore and leaves words and splotches on photos he doesn’t seem to have been near. What is going on in this quiet community, where did he come from and who is this naked teenage boy?
The opening credits are among the best I have seen for a long time. A brush moving its way across the screen, painting a blood red colour, followed by very close up images of hooks, meat, flies and more blood. These brief images, with its accompanying music mean you start the film already in a state of trepidation and intrigue.
The director, Sheldon Wilson, follows this with intertwined scenes of normalcy, the sheriffs packing up, talking about what they are going to do next, and creepiness, a blood soaked and dripping naked teenage boy walking through a forest, knife in hand.
We are only 10 minutes or so into the film and I am already caught up by what is on screen and fascinated over where this film is going to go!
Shallow Ground is superbly filmed, using great camera work and some wonderfully over the top background music, and works so well because it adds a supernatural slant to the story almost matter of factly. It doesn’t make it so over the top it is unbelievable but just slowly introduces more weird occasions as the police investigate Is this boy the serial killer the sheriff has been haunted by, but if so where does all the blood covering him come from, even more so when it starts seeping from his body. Every revelation adds more questions to your ideas and deductions about what is going on, the script is written in such a way as to reveal enough to keep the story moving but also to keep more surprises popping up, not an easy task these days.
This is a bone chilling horror film off the top shelf, and as such it should have appeared in cinemas in 2005, though the bigger, Hollywood made, big star appearing ‘Skeleton Key’ supplanted it for those reasons and that it has a 15 cert not an 18, lower certificate means more people will go and see it, or so the cinema chains seem to think. I’m not convinced of that at all and Saw would seem to show a good 18 cert horror can draw the crowds. This is a shame as I think it would attract a better audience than Skeleton Key (I may retract that statement after seeing it but I doubt it!)
Shallow ground has a director I have never heard of and a cast of competent actors. None of them will be stars and none of them have been in anything I have ever heard of but they are all good enough in this to not get you distracted by terrible acting. It is just that none of them stand out through their acting abilities (though the female doctor does look very nice indeed! ) Shallow Ground is certainly recommended by me, though it loses on the rating because even though it has a short running time (97 mins) the last 10 or so minutes are just awful! Pulling a superior film down in to the realm of a bog standard horror movie and allying itself with the ones mentioned at the top of the review. This is a real shame as the rest of it is so good, so tense and suspenseful; maybe the ending isn’t that bad on paper but when the majority of the film is as good as it is I felt let down by the end.
You would have to see the film to understand why as I don’t want to go into to many details about the nature of what I don’t like, as that would ruin it, and necessitate more details about the plot as well, and I do say see it if you get the chance, it is certainly worth it!
Summary: A horror film with a difference
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