Producers: William Shockley, Grainger Hines, Tom Brady, Allen Gilmer, Tiiu Loigu and Justin Kreinbrink Director: William Shockley   Screenplay: Shelley Reid, William Shockley and Grainger Hines   Cast: Blaine Maye, Sarah Cortez, Grainger Hines, David St. Louis, Chris Mulkey, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Mark Markoff, Dominic Monaghan, Jacqueline Bisset, Dermot Mulroney, Anthony Skordi, Cosima Cabrera, Gavin Warren, Nancy La Scala, Pressly Coker, Robert Jensen. Edgar de Santiago, Ryder Franco, Devon Michaels, Gilbert Glenn Brown, Brick Patrick and Dawn Marie   Distributor: ArtAffects Entertainment/Quiver Distribution

Grade: C-

For most of its running-time this first feature by veteran actor and writer William Shockley is an old Western standby—the revenge horse opera, in which a man grimly tracks down the outlaws who killed his family.  Then in the last act it suddenly turns into a history lesson about law and medicine that allows for a happy ending despite all the mayhem that’s preceded it.  “Long Shadows” is an oddball addition to a hoary sagebrush genre. 

And a lugubrious one.  Sergio Leone’s myriad versions of this plot were slow, but in an operatic way that had a hypnotic effect, with their swooning visuals backed up by Ennio Morricone’s inspired music.  Shockley’s take, as edited by Chris Patterson, is simply ponderous, prettily shot by cinematographer A.J. Raitano on location in Arizona (even if Daniel Koenig’s production design and Paula Rogers’ costumes don’t have a really lived-in look) but with a bland score by Tommy Fields.

The catalyst for the plot is an 1880 attack on the Dollar homestead outside Tucson by an outlaw gang led by Knox Weaver (Ronnie Gene Blevins).  All the details of what transpired are revealed only gradually in periodic flashbacks, but Preston Dollar (Brick Patrick) is shot to death along with his wife Rebecca (Dawn Marie), and their young son Marcus (Gavin Warren) is left for dead, one of the bandits having slit his throat.

The boy manages to survive through the efforts of local Dr. Ginsburg (Devon Michaels), however, and grows up in a Tucson orphanage.  At eighteen he emerges, now played by Blaine Maye, with revenge on his mind.  But before he undertakes the ride home to visit his parents’ graves, he stops at a brothel called Purgatory run by cunning Vivian Villeré (Jacqueline Bisset) and her preening lieutenant Ned Duxbury (Dominic Monaghan). 

Those two, played archly by Bisset and Monaghan (the latter has an especially embarrassing drunk scene), don’t really have much to do in what follows, even though Shockley occasionally returns to them, but Vivian is important in that she introduces Marcus to Dulce Flores (Sarah Cortez), a local girl who plays piano in the bar but is being pressured to become part of Vivian’s upstairs staff.  Instead of taking advantage of the girl, Marcus liberates her from the place on the mule he’s bought, dropping her off with her sister Blanca (Cosima Cabrera) before proceeding to his old homestead.

There he finds not only his parents’ tombstones, nicely inscribed, but the place’s new owner, gruff ex-gunman Dallas Garrett (Dermot Mulroney).  Dallas takes a liking to the boy and reluctantly agrees when Marcus asks for instruction in gunplay.  He’s spied one of the men who killed his folks in town, and is bent on beginning his work, even though Garrett warns that killing will take a heavy toll on him.

What follows is fairly predictable stuff.  With some advice from Berto Medina, a friend from the orphanage (played as a boy by Ryder Franco and as a young man by Edgar de Santiago), Marcus tracks down two of the gang—Len Kasper (Mike Markoff) and Kip Riley (Robert Jensen)—and summarily shoots them.  Then he sets his sights on Weaver.

By this time, however, he’s being pursued by the law in the person of Sheriff Wesley Tibbs (Grainger Hines), a grizzled veteran grieving the loss of his own family, and his loyal deputy Deac Barnes (David St. Louis). Eventually they take him in, gravely wounded, and Dulce returns to tend to him before the inevitable trial before ambitious Judge Roy Holt (Chris Mulkey), an old colleague of Tibbs who considers himself progressively minded.

That’s where Shockley and his co-writers Hines and Shelley Reid (who also takes a cameo in the movie) toss in a couple of curveballs involving late nineteenth-century changes in legal procedure. One altered a practice that allowed the Weaver gang to escape execution years earlier, while another permitted lesser charges in murder cases.  But the latter was predicated on advancements in medicine, particularly what’s here referred to as the newfangled specialty of psychology.  Fortunately for Marcus, Dr. Ginsburg’s friend Dr. Thomas Dorsey (Gilbert Glenn Brown)–an actual person who, as one of the historically-based end captions informs us–was among the first black graduates of Harvard, just happens to be in town to offer a diagnosis that changes dramatically what we were shown earlier in the picture, a trick that comes dangerously close to a cheat.

The last-act twists add some interest to what’s basically a formulaic tale, but the plodding presentation vitiates even those attempts at audience education.  Only a few of the cast show much vitality given Shockley’s solemn pacing—Bisset and Monaghan to some extent but especially Mulkey, who’s the sole person to bring some humor to his performance.  Everyone else plays things with such seriousness, and Mayes and Cortez such amateurishness to boot, that by the end the movie has a deadening effect. Even fanciers of that dying breed, the Western, will have a hard time finding much to like in “Long Shadows.”  

Producers: Aaron B. Koontz, Cameron Burns, Ashleigh Sneed and Chris Stuckmann   Director: Chris Stuckmann   Screenplay: Chris Stuckmann   Cast: Camille Sullivan, Brendan Sexton III, Keith David, Sarah Durn, Charlie Talbert, Robin Bartlett, Anthony Baldasare, Caisey Cole, Eric Francis Melagragni, Emily Bennett, Derek Mears, Rob Grant and Michael Beach   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C-

Chris Stuckmann, who’s won some fame as a YouTube influencer and movie reviewer, tries his hand at feature filmmaking with this horror flick.  As Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” reminds us, many of the famed directors of that influential French cinematic movement were former film critics, so in that respect Stuckmann is in good company.  Unhappily, “Shelby Oaks” proves he’s not in their league.

The movie starts out as a found-footage thriller involving a quartet of ghost hunters who call themselves the Paranormal Paranoids; they disappear while looking for answers in the eponymous ghost town located in Darke County, Ohio, where they visit an abandoned amusement park and a deserted prison.  Many online commentators dismiss their disappearance as a clumsy publicity stunt, but soon the bodies of three of them, Peter (Anthony Baldasare), Laura (Caisey Cole), and David (Eric Francis Melagragni), are found.  The fate of their leader, spunky Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), however, remains a mystery; grainy footage in one of the group’s cameras shows the terrified girl sitting on a bed in a ramshackle house before peeking out into a dark hallway where she’s heard ominous sounds.  There the footage ends.

Cut to 2020, twelve years after the group’s misadventure. Riley’s sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) is explaining to a documentary filmmaker her determination to continue searching for her sister, despite the misgivings of her husband (Brendan Sexton III); shockingly a wild-eyed man (Charlie Talbert) shows up at Mia’s door, clutching a video cassette and a gun, with which he abruptly shoots himself in the head.  The tape contains footage of the searches Riley and her colleagues were conducting in the environs of Shelby Oaks just before they were killed—or, in Riley’s case, perhaps abducted.

Mia explains that ever since childhood Riley had been convinced that she was being stalked by some malignant creature that scratched at her bedroom window in the night; could that creature be behind what happened at Shelby Oaks?  Closer inspection of the footage of Riley’s last known moments has revealed some suggestive details. 

To find out the truth, Mia retraces her sister’s steps and, after identifying the suicide, a man named Wilson Miles, as a former inmate of the prison, she interviews both the police detective (Michael Beach) who headed the original investigation and the former warden (Keith David). She also visits the shuttered prison, where she encounters a growling dog, and the surrounding woods, where she finds not only the dog but signs of Satanic activity.  Finally she stumbles upon an isolated house where an elderly woman named Norma (Robin Bartlett) invites her in for crackers and tea.  What transpires there might be described as “Rosemary’s Baby” transposed to “Blair Witch” territory, followed by a coda reemphasizing Mia’s earlier hope to become a mother as well as Riley’s fears about being stalked by some demonic entity.

“Shelby Oaks” doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, and one can waste a good deal of time scrutinizing its logical lapses; but that’s a common failing in horror movies, and genre fans are a forgiving bunch.  What they’re less likely to tolerate is a lumbering pace and a lack of genuine scares.  Stuckmann manages a few jolts, like the suicide scene, although it’s hard to judge whether the credit goes to him or to Mike Flanagan, who reportedly helped to spruce up the movie, shot a few years back, for commercial release. 

But overall the movie is slackly paced, with entirely too many draggy scenes of Mia stumbling about in the dark, flashlight in hand.  (The editing is credited to Patrick Lawrence and Brett W, Bachman.)  The score by James Burkholder and The Newton Boys tries to ramp up the feeling of dread, but to no avail.  And Stuckmann relies too heavily on overly familiar horror tropes.  The jumbled use of documentary, found footage and straight narrative formats doesn’t help matters either.

Nor does the execution.  While the picture doesn’t look bad for a movie bankrolled by a Kickstarter campaign (a fact that explains the ludicrously long list of executive and co-producers in the final credits—as well as a guaranteed audience)—the location choices are evocative, and cinematographer Andrew Scott Baird uses them decently, the grainy “old” video footage especially well caught, even if some of the payoff scenes at the end are terribly murky.  The acting, even by the established veterans, is at best adequate, with Sullivan rather stilted throughout.  The standout is Bartlett, who does much with very little, though some of her scenes will elicit giggles for their chintziness.

Those who’ve enjoyed Stuckmann’s YouTube work might also enjoy “Shelby Oaks.”  But anyone acquainted with horror movies will recognize that in making it Stuckmann has acted like the hounds of hell it features, ravenously chowing down on the genre’s clichés and then just repurposing them to his own mediocre ends. The result is a rather torpid collection of overused tropes that isn’t redeemed by the director’s decision to jump around from one storytelling format to another.