Shelby Oaks (2025)

I thought this was going to be about a woman called “Shelby Oaks” but instead it’s a petty shameless hybrid of “Blair Witch” meets “The Omen” by way of the Blumhouse cutting room floor - and it isn’t very good. It starts out in sensationalised faux-documentary mode as it explains to us that four folks from one of YouTube’s most successful American paranormal investigation programmes have gone missing in the woods near the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks. Bodies are duly, and rather gruesomely, discovered but not that of “Riley” (Sarah Durn) and her sister “Mia” (Camille Sullivan) is determined to find out just what happened. Scoot on a few years and a strange man arrives at her door clutching a camera tape. Might this give her the clues she needs to set off into the creepy woods and get to the bottom of this mystery? There is one scene is this film where she is sitting, blood-stained, on her sofa at home after a fairly traumatic experience on her doorstep and her husband come to sit beside her. He just says “Are you OK?”. She nods. He goes off into the kitchen and opens a can of beer. That rather sums up the depths of any characterisation here as this lacklustre effort struggles to make any headway for a dreary ninety minutes. What follows is more of an homage to about a dozen other films from this genre, than anything remotely original in itself. The acting is as bad as the dialogue and the ending has all the terror of the more menacing “Ursula” scenes from Disney’s “Little Mermaid” (1989). I saw this all by myself in the cinema, and it’s easy to see why. Perhaps this genre needs to start with better casting and stories and not just rely on creaking trees and spooky audio effects to sell us a story. I wouldn’t bother, sorry.