By Geno McGahee
I love incredibly low budget horror movies. If you are unfamiliar with micro-budget horror flicks, you may not watch more than 2 minutes of it, but as a true horror fan, I believe in patience and forgiveness. You must look beyond their production value, forgive the bad acting, and just try to see the heart behind it.
DARK SHADE CREEK only had a $500 budget and it shows. The production value is about as bad as it gets and the editing was terrible. There was hundreds of fades to black and many times, it made no sense, and the fades lasted far too long. It gets tiresome.
The storyline is that there was a logger in the 1940s that was dating his boss’s daughter until his boss found out and poisoned him with LSD and he now roams the woods in search for revenge. He is crazy and angry and the small town understands that and knows to avoid him, but when campers come in to stay, they ignore the warnings and come face to face with the true evil.
This film is very hard to stick with. You have to give credit to David Mankey for writing it and producing it, but it was very unoriginal and uninspired. It just seemed that the makers loved horror and wanted to make a horror movie and just didn’t have any cohesive ideas and didn’t develop much of whatever they did have.
Many of the characters were so over the top and unbelievable that they were hard to accept and the main characters were not developed well. The main purpose of this film was to provide a slight backstory and then just kill off the characters. It worked in the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, but those were fare deeper than this. There wasn’t much thought that went into this one…just elements from other films put together and meaningless dialogue leading up to it. There’s the thought that every line of a script should push the story forward. That is not the case here.
DARK SHADE CREEK is hard to recommend, even to those that prefer no-budget flicks. It picks up in the third act, but it still isn’t something to get excited for. I wanted to like this movie, but it was terrible. I can’t recommend it.
Rating: 1.5/10