Dir - Chris Cronin
Overall: MEH
Imperfect and problematically overlong, The Moor simultaneously boasts some refreshing moments while getting stuck in the muck, (or stuck in the peat as it were). The first full-length from director Chris Cronin, it opens with a long take that serves as a flashback inciting incident and an unsettling one at that, then skipping ahead twenty years where the somber tone is locked into for the next two hours. As the title would suggest, much of the narrative revolves around vast miles of moorland where a serial killer allegedly buried his victims, one of those victim's fathers gathering a small team to go and investigate all these years later. There are supernatural elements gingerly introduced along the way before they become more prominent, and most of these moments are done in lingering, eerie stillness, never becoming terrifying yet certainly being intriguing enough. Cronin occasionally taps into the tripe mannerisms, (jump scares are indulged in as much as they are avoided, plus we get one of those scenes where a psychic woman gets taken over by malevolent forces and contorts her body backwards while making wide-eyed/wide-mouthed screechy noises), and he switches to both POV and documentary footage which creates a jarring effect. The performers all match the film's overall brooding agenda of grief and desperation, but it falls short of properly utilizing its inherently creepy setting, indulging itself with ambition.
Dir - Caroline Lindy
Overall: MEH
Written and directed by actor-turned filmmaker Caroline Lindy, Your Monster is a conglomerate of backstage theater shenanigans, broadly painted douchebag narcissistic exes, and a Beauty and the Beast budding romance. It is inventive as a breakup movie, fusing its desperate ingredients together with some refreshing dialog and a command performance from Melissa Barrera, but some of those ingredients seem like they need to simmer longer. Allegedly, Lindy conceived of the project as a fantastical reworking of an actual breakup that she went through, one that bares similarities to that of Barrera's protagonist who gets dumped mid-cancer treatment by her playwright boyfriend Edmund Donovan whom she is still head-over-heels about and devastated for losing. This is after she helped him write his latest work whose lead character is named after, based on, and was promised to her. In other words, Donovan is a one-note asshole, too much of an asshole to get on board with in the context of the plot which needs him to keep one-upping his fuckhead behavior in order for Barrera to embrace her rage and fire back. Some of these moments are delightful, as are many of the scenes between her and Tommy Dewey's Neanderthal-esque monster who have the most plausible report with each other, even if their relationship blossoms from traumatic and violate to romantic and nurturing in a fast enough manner to move things along. Still, the ending fails to land and it navigates a tricky tonal balance admirably if not precisely.
Dir - Chris Stuckermann
Overall: MEH
The derivative full-length debut Shelby Oaks from Youtuber Chris Stuckermann is not a good film, which is not surprising considering that many would-be filmmakers would also drop the ball after launching the most successful Kickstarter campaign for such a project, getting the green light to make an honest to goodness "real" movie in a genre that many people tap into for their first go-round behind the lens. Patronizing aside, Stuckermann's efforts here are professional looking and he takes a commendable swing at fusing found footage with conventional movie-making, be it of a detrimentally hackneyed variety. There lies the problem in that every plot point, every stylistic nuance, every jump scare, and every freaky detail lacks inventiveness. Worse yet, they collapse upon themselves in a melodramatic and confused mess that throws a hodgepodge of familiarity at the screen in hoping that something will stick in an ambiguously disturbing sense. Obviously it does not work that way, and maybe some viewers can scold Stuckermann for knowing better considering his film critic profession, but pointing out the pluses and minuses in things and then making a thing yourself are two different expressive muscles to develop. The film is an odd duck to be sure. Plot holes are glaring, leading to performances and beats that fail to line up properly and come off as unconvincing at best, unintentionally funny at worst. So with a faulty structure, basic storytelling language clumsily executed, and nothing new brought to the horror table, it merely has the aesthetic and ambition of something better than it is.
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