SHORTCUT

Stars: Jack Kane, Zander Emlano, Zak Sutcliffe, Sophie Jane Oliver, Molly Dew, David Keyes, Terence Anderson and Matteo De Gregori.
Writer: Daniele Cosci
Director: Alessio Liguori

Rating: ★ ★ ★

A serviceable creature-feature that will play well enough with housebound under-’20s, the patch-quilt monster-movie/teen drama Shortcut is light on logic but buoyed by an engaging spirit. It will certainly be an advantage if you haven’t seen any of the Jeepers Creepers trilogy, Neil Marshall’s Descent or Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic, genre works that clearly influenced writer Daniele Cosci and director Alessio Liguori (and we’ll get to The Breakfast Club beats later), but for a streaming-service rip of those DVD-era guilty pleasures, Shortcut is perfectly watchable.

An Italian/German co-production that dresses up its Euro locales as a very green middle America, we meet our five heroes on a bus trip heading somewhere deep in the woods. Under the care of warmhearted bus driver Joseph (Terence Anderson) are (cue Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’) the every-dude Nolan (Jack Kane), arty blonde Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver), life-of-the-party Karl (Zander Emlano), bespectacled nerd Queenie (Molly Dew) and tough guy rebel Reg (Zak Sutcliffe). Forced onto a sideroad (not really a ‘shortcut’, but...), they are hijacked by snarling escapee Pedro (David Keyes, going all-in on his bad guy turn), a madman known for eating the tongues of his victims.

Pedro soon becomes the least of their problems when their bus breaks down in an abandoned tunnel and the resident of the darkness, a Mothman-like parasitic-humanoid that comes to be known as ‘The Nocturne Wanderer’, begins to hunt them down. Forced into a labyrinthine network of concrete corridors that come with their own dark secrets, the five must find a common strength to survive.

‘Why a whole school bus for these five students?’, ‘Why these five students?’ and ‘Where are they going?’ are just some of the questions left unanswered while watching Shortcut, but such deep-thinking is not really necessary; in fact, it’s best to disengage from reality entirely. These five kids symbolise all teens, and the monsters they face are the allegorical challenges all adolescents face as adulthood looms. 

That might seem a long bow to pull to cut Liguori’s film some slack, but it goes some way to explaining away incongruities and shortcomings that would otherwise derail Shortcut. Age-appropriate audiences will draw more from the characterisations and the dilemmas they face than jaded critics or hardcore horror hounds. 

The overall standard of production - Luca Santagostino’s evocative low-light cinematography; Jacopo Reale’s slick editing; the top-tier practical make-up effects of creature crew supervisor Leonardo Cruciano and offsider Elisabetta Paccapelo - refuses to allow the film to be dismissed as trashy monster malarkey. It generally delivers on that front, of course, but earns respect as a more ambitious entry in the genre.