The directorial debut of Sung Kang, best known for the mellow swagger he brings to Han in the Fast & Furious franchise, Shaky Shivers is a horror-comedy so hacky it’d make any self-respecting ax murderer hang up his hatchet. Written by Andrew McAllister and Aaron Strongoni, who boast long showbiz resumes and, in the latter’s case at least, a familiarity penning silly horror schlock like Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, this cheap two-hander barrels through its bad jokes and horror tropes like it knows it won’t survive the night. You have to wonder if Kang’s cameo at the finale, a lisping oddball making Michael Jackson references, indicates his sense of humor. If so, I do not share it. If not, I have no idea why he made this terrible movie other than to prove he can string 77 minutes of footage together.
Maybe he lost a bet, where he had to make a movie satisfying a bingo card’s worth of recognizable genre material—but with the added challenge of forging the connective tissue out of rejected Two and a Half Men jokes. There certainly seems to be some sort of ulterior meta-motive as we follow ice cream shopworker Lucy (Brooke Markham), who thinks she’s going to turn into a werewolf. She and her friend Karen (VyVy Nguyen) drive out to an abandoned summer camp to wait things out—and sloppily check every horror box while they do so.
Bigfoots, zombies, werewolves, backfiring spells, masked cultists, mysterious witches doling out curses, undue horniness—Shaky Shivers squanders them all as it lazily considers each, like an ancient fussbudget comparing soup cans at the grocery store. And the movie still feels empty. Like a lot of no-cash indies that don’t have much going on, Shaky Shivers kills time with lots of B-roll footage. Cars pulling up, going around corners, cruising down the road. Vehicular filler. Nothing improves once these cars arrive. There’s a lot of (literal) sitting around the same location-and-a-half, with characters often describing things they saw off-screen. It speaks to a movie with a short film’s worth of ideas, dragged kicking and screaming past the hour mark.
That desperately stretched runtime—combined with the cartoonish performances, repeated jokes and Timo Chen’s overbearing, hokey score that comes in at inopportune moments—makes you think that it’s a satirical genre primer that erroneously believes that kids are simple. But Shaky Shivers only wears the Spirit Halloween costume of a children’s movie.
The profanity and uncomfortable sex jokes garnishing the bland tedium’s sub-sitcom punchlines taint Shaky Shivers’ usefulness even as a Goosebumps-lover’s time-killer. And when the material is ostensibly all-ages, you wish nobody had to hear it. Lucy and Karen happen upon a binder of D&D-based rituals (speaking with the dead, turning folks into zombies) with eye-rolling incantations like “Naan queso Taliban.” Stupid and xenophobic! But even the film’s most tired payoffs are better than the countless gags that never reach one—and much better than the “I can’t believe we’re actually going to do this in the year of our lord 2023” relics, like an annoying blonde customer (also named Karen) who demands to speak to the ice cream parlor’s manager.
This off-putting humor is mostly but not entirely the fault of McAllister and Strongoni’s screenplay. The right, rhythmic editing can make even the worst script move like a spry comedy. A slow, ogling camera can leave even the best performers out to dry. Shaky Shivers can’t even clap on the ones and threes. Nguyen gets blood barfed up all over her face? Cutting on her scream as she realizes her predicament would be a lot more effective than letting the moment play out, her yell fading to a soft, sad whimper. She all but starts looking around for someone to say cut before we finally, mercifully move on. It’s amateur filmmaking that does its cast dirty.
Nguyen and Markham, both with the manic, dead-eyed energy of a Blue’s Clues host, have an unforgiving assignment. Not only is their material terrible, they’re asked to hop through tones like a jiangshi. Lucy and Karen cannot seem to decide what reality they live in, which will kill a comedy as surely as a stake through a vampire’s heart.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, one of the best horror-comedies ever made, earns its laughs from its two hillbillies—stereotypically the villains of the genre—taking the outrageous slasher situation foisted upon them seriously. Other horror-comedies go the other way and quip their little hearts out while monsters rip their little hearts out. You just need to pick a lane. Lucy and Karen swap between wholeheartedly weeping at the death of a co-worker and half-heartedly riffing about wanting to fuck him.
The only bright spots in Shaky Shivers are a couple of the monster designs, which are suitably gross, organic and far more competent than this movie deserves, especially considering how brightly and unflatteringly they’re lit by Kang. That Shaky Shivers invests in its creatures at all indicates a passion for its genre that’s otherwise completely absent. It does, finally, make you wonder if Kang is just a goofy horror fan with so little to say for himself in the genre that he resigns his film to worn-out riffs. This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.
Director: Sung Kang
Writer: Andrew McAllister, Aaron Strongoni
Starring: Brooke Markham, VyVy Nguyen, Jimmy Bellinger, Herschel Sparber, Skyler Day, Erin Daniels
Release Date: September 21, 2023
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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