Shallow Ground

I have to admit that it was a tad unfortunate that, when I made this blog for the primary purpose of critiquing the horror movies I watch, the first horror movie I actually watched to review ended up being terrible. Fortunately, that’s not the case here, so we can all go cheerily pretending that yesterday’s entry didn’t exist, or at least was written after this one, all right? All right.

So as you may have cleverly guessed from the above, I rather enjoyed Shallow Ground. For a low budget straight to DVD horror movie it was a whole lot better than it needed to be (and, along with Dead End and Boo, makes me rather optimistic about the straight to DVD horror movies I’ve ordered for this year, unlike the ones I got for last Halloween season, which were by and large pretty bland and dull). The acting was decent, if not spectacular, there was a good plot that actually hasn’t been done to death before, there was plenty of pretty realistic gore, there were some properly spooky locations, there was pretty much everything you could ask for in a film like this.

The plot in question concerns a small woodlands town that’s in the process of packing everything up and disappearing now that a nearby bridge has been completed, when a young man walks into the police station dressed only in a whole lot of blood and wielding a knife that swiftly disappears. Soon, the young man is fountaining blood out of himself, causing visions in whoever touches it, revealing himself to have the fingerprints of multiple missing persons, and causing a whole lot of grief for the local police force. I don’t think I’m ruining anything by mentioning that the head of the police force has a tragic past connected to the young man, or that he finds he now has to atone for his old mistake that resulted in the death of a girl, or that the serial killer is strongly hinted to be one person, only to shockingly turn out to be someone completely random, or…well, despite this list of cliches, it really is a fun movie, and you can get it on Amazon for only ten bucks. Go check it out.