Lock It Up: "The Shed" veers into routine but still well-made and fairly fun

The Shed (2019)

97 min.

Release Date: November 15, 2019 (Limited & VOD); January 7, 2020 (DVD/Blu-ray)

The horror genre hasn’t seen too many vampire films in a couple years, and yet, writer-director Frank Sabatella’s low-budget effort “The Shed” isn’t really being advertised much as a vampire film. Part gory horror pic and part angsty teenage melodrama, the film filters “Fright Night” and “The Lost Boys” through 2013’s disturbing, thoughtful “The Dirties,” a found-footage film in which movie-obsessed high school boys exact revenge on their bullies. “The Shed” doesn’t quite go far enough as the anti-bullying wish-fulfillment morality tale that it sets up to be, but even as a routine monster movie, it’s a well-made and fairly entertaining one.

Midwestern high schooler Stan (Jay Jay Warren) has lost both of his parents, one to cancer and the other to suicide, and now lives a miserable life with his abusive alcoholic grandfather Ellis (Timothy Bottoms). He’s had enough trouble with the law, spending time in juvenile detention and being on a first-name basis with Sheriff Dorney (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), that Stan cannot afford to end up back in the care of the state. At school, Stan always comes to best friend Dommer’s (Cody Kostro) rescue from bully Marble (Chris Petrovski) and can barely muster up the courage to talk to his old friend, Roxy (Sofia Happonen), who’s fallen in with a different crowd. Once Stan discovers there’s something monstrous hiding out in his grandfather’s woodshed, he has bigger problems. He wants to keep what’s inside the shed a secret, but once Dommer gets wind of the “pet monster,” he sees it as a solution to getting rid of their enemies.

“The Shed” sets out to make vampires scary again, yet writer-director Frank Sabatella wisely chooses to focus more on the characters facing the monster. He shows his hand rather early in the startling opening moments, where a hunter (Frank Whaley) gets chased and then bitten by a vampire in the woods before running to shade in a tool shed. As soon as the film introduces Stan and his picture-perfect parents, these scenes come off painfully earnest, bordering on amateurishness, until that tone reveals itself to be by design. Aside from these early moments, the film thereafter might lean a little too heavily on dream and sometimes dream-within-a-dream sequences, slackening the otherwise tight pacing. The script is unfussy, never laying on the mythology of how the antagonist came to be, and the setting of the story is also appealingly vague, possibly set in the 1990s, where there are older cars and rotary phones.

Jay Jay Warren is a solid lead as Stan, suitably sullen but sympathetic enough with the character’s horrible home life, and then grows into the part even more when Stan must become heroic. Cody Kostro is also quite strong as the wiry Dommer, whose mouth always seems to provoke the bullies at school, until he gets to turn the tables. Once a key character’s participation in the narrative becomes diminished, “The Shed” does veer into a more standard, if still tense, board-up-the-house-and-wait standoff. It’s not much, but it has enough retro vibes for fans who miss seeing this particular brand of horror.

Grade: B -