"Shortcut" nicely atmospheric but filled with bland characters and a lot of wheel-spinning

Shortcut (2020)

Shortcuts on road trips are always death traps in the movies, and the same goes for five teenagers and their bus driver in Italian horror flick “Shortcut.” For their in-and-out genre exercise, director Alessio Liguori and writer Daniele Cosci manage to cross “Jeepers Creepers 2” with “The Goonies,” “Attack the Block,” and a kernel of “The Breakfast Club.” The basic parts are there in a good-looking, nicely atmospheric package, but Liguori and Cosci’s concise 80-minute running time and economical approach actually underwhelm, making “Shortcut” feel like a lot of lackluster wheel-spinning.

On a school bus ride to seemingly nowhere, there are five teenagers: Nolan (Jack Kane), the ordinary boy who has a crush on the ordinary girl, artist Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver); Queenie (Molly Dew), who has glasses and braces; Karl (Zander Emlano), the plump, talkative one; and Reggie (Zak Sutcliffe), the rebel with a poor home life. They discuss a lunar eclipse on the horizon and go on with their boring ride before bus driver Joseph (Terence Anderson) ends up taking an alternate route. Just as Joseph stops the bus to move a deer carcass out of the road, he is accosted by a creepy man (David Keyes) whom Karl recognizes as a serial killer known as “the Tongue Eater.” A psychopath would be enough peril for these kids and their driver, but a screeching bat creature in a dark tunnel begins to hunt them. They feel trapped, until the kids put it together that this thing can’t stand the light. Problem solved!

At the onset, “Shortcut” mildly subverts expectations by adding a second antagonist of a more otherworldly variety, but everything feels routine after that. The ugly terrorizer, later known as the “nocturne wanderer,” is creepy and cool-looking, if not entirely different from the vampiric monster in 1997’s HBO movie “Stephen King’s The Night Flier.” The film, though, stops dead for some downtime when we and the characters must learn more about the monster through clunky exposition. Though the actors do feel like real teens, the characters are, unfortunately, a rather bland bunch, being whittled down to types. None of them are characterized with engaging personalities, except maybe Karl as the comic relief, while the bus driver, Joseph, deserved better and Reggie is given the shorthand treatment by being a rebel because his father is in prison. Even when some of them must step up and courageously come together, the getting-there feels preordained rather than earned somehow. 

“Shortcut” deserves kudos for what it does as a low-budget teen adventure/creature feature hybrid, but the technical aspects are on more solid ground than the script. To go with the nasty monster, there is an appealingly dark fairy-tale undertone, and the score of a gothic choir and synthesizer beats helps put one on edge. Rather than leave well enough alone, the film goes the way of so many American horror movies with an unnecessary sequel-hook coda. For a film that more vividly pits kids against a monster and leaves them changed, look to Andy Muschietti's “It” movies instead.

Grade: C

Gravitas Ventures released “Shortcut” (80 min.) in theaters September 25, 2020, followed by a digital release on December 22, 2020.