
Film review YouTube personality turned writer/director/producer Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks (C) gets points for chutzpah; it’s one thing to critique others’ movies and another thing altogether to conceive of and mobilize for one’s own full debut motion picture production. The film does a good job setting up the premise of a missing paranormal/occult documentary crew last seen alive in a rural region known mainly for an abandoned amusement park and jail. Seemingly the scene is set and the mixed media atmosphere established for a deep dive into what happened. Camille Sullivan plays the protagonist, older sister of the missing blond at the center of the mystery; neither she nor other incidental characters (the venerable Keith David among them) have the script or the presence to pull off anything too out of the ordinary from the proceedings. Both the derivative procedural and supernatural elements don’t break any new ground, and the ending is rushed. It shows promise more than mastery in terms of sustained suspense, What could have been radical or revolutionary is mostly merely routine.