www.shallowgroundmovie.com
Dir: Sheldon Wilson
Cast: Timothy V. Murphy, Stan Kirsch, Patricia McCormack, Lindsey Stoddart
Man covered in blood
able to trickle away
doesn't make much sense
Shallow Ground is a hard movie to summarise as it doesn't possess the most coherent of plots. It all begins with a young naked blood-soaked man coming out of the woods and arriving at the countryside office of local sheriff, Jack Sheppard (Murphy). Poor old Jack is struggling to come to terms with the death of local girl Amy who was slain in the woods by a hooded killer - he had the chance to save her life but uttered one of the classic genre lines, "You'll be safe here," or, "I'll be right back," and of course we all know what happens to characters in that kind of movie. They die. With blood-boy handcuffed to the chair and not saying anything things take an even weirder turn as cryptic messages appear on the doors ("No one leaves") and blood seems to ebb and flow across the floor at will. When paramedic Darby (Natalie Avital) runs some makeshift blood tests on our fella she discovers that he has at least three different blood types, which coincidentally happen to match a number of missing persons in the area... and (you shouldn't laugh, but you will) if you cut and paste the various mugshots of these people together the resultant photo-fit looks remarkably like our bloody friend. As officer Dempsey (Kirsch) rightly exclaims at this moment, "This doesn't make any sense!" You have to give first time director Wilson some credit here, there are a number of original ideas in Shallow Ground. The main problem is they don't work terribly well together in the one film. You've got all the issues with the bloody character - probably the strongest idea in the movie - mixed in with the homicidal maniac on the loose, plus a hokey subplot involving Dempsey and some lowlife drug dealer to contend with. It does kinda pull together in the end but there's little in the way of an explanation as to what's happening. Wilson gives it his best shot on a limited budget and produces an intriguing piece of work here. Unfortunately the acting is fairly poor, but then again the entire script is straight out of The Big Book of Movie Cliches. Having said that, the cheesy dialogue does add a fun element to the film and certainly for my part made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable as I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I'll certainly be interested to see what Wilson can do with a decent script and a bigger budget. Could be a name to watch.
soulmining rating: ***
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