Director Alessio Liguori shoots the Italian setting of this teen horror with skin-prickling intensity, though its zany charm undercuts any real tension
Shot in
Italy, with an English cast, there’s a crisp, almost fairytale levity to Alessio Liguori’s horror adventure that sits oddly but not unworkably with its gorier elements. It’s not quite clear exactly where it is set: perhaps actually in Italy, as the group of five youngsters being escorted on a red vintage bus are from an international school. Bantering with their driver, the party are jumped by a gun-toting convict when they stop to clear a dead deer off the road. But when the bus halts in a tunnel, with a shrouded shape huddled in front of them on the tarmac, they realise there’s worse out there.
Liguori and writer Daniele Cosci don’t do much more than establish the character types of this Breakfast Club of teenagers: normals Nolan and Bess, swotty Queenie, joker Karl and bad boy Reggie. Not getting bogged down in interpersonal relationships means giving freer rein to the basic claustrophobia of their predicament, as their vehicle is menaced by a bulbous-headed beastie that looks a bit like William Blake’s Ghost of a Flea on crack. But Shortcut is not really tense: there’s a presiding zaniness that is almost cartoonish, with Zander Emlano’s Karl – whose lazy charm makes him the standout performer – especially game for screaming straight to camera. It’s one “yikes” away from being Scooby-Doo.