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This year might have featured memorable scary movies like a recent hit and another anticipated title, but this Halloween offers frighteningly poor choices by contrast. Recently released follow-up the second Black Phone film demonstrated a franchise losing momentum, while now, this low-budget disappointment Shelby Oaks attempts unsuccessfully to launch a fresh franchise. This is a rough attempt to recreate the eerie dread of the iconic found-footage movie, a classic that has until now proved impossible to replicate.

A First Film of YouTube Critic a Popular YouTuber

This marks the first feature of YouTube film critic the well-known critic, and he premiered crowdfunded movie at the previous genre-led Fantasia festival. It gained the attention of a distribution company, a company which recently achieved unexpected acclaim with a chilling thriller a recent hit. Surprisingly, they gave the director extra budget to improve and reportedly add more gore, before packaging it up with a similar drip-feed marketing campaign as this year's must-see Halloween film. However, not any quantity of late-stage patchwork can hide what still feels clumsily incomplete, a cheaply cobbled together head-scratcher that simply isn't ready for a wide theatrical release.

Its Storyline and Delivery

Considering Stuckmann's background, it's no surprise that he's more comfortable with portraying digital culture, and this is in the opening stretch that the film shows some promise. A faux-documentary sets up the sad story of the Paranormal Paranoids led by a character named Riley (played by Sarah Durn). Riley vanished years prior, and her sibling Mia (Camille Sullivan, too overwrought) is fixated with locating her ever since. This is a derivative introduction, set in the late 2000s and resembling several of the found-footage hits from that time, yet this style that Stuckmann probably should have stayed in, with the visually ambitious, style-reliant live-action plot that follows turning out far trickier.

Mia's quest to find Riley just never sweeps us along, a remarkably flat and uninvolving trek, led by clues found on a tape that might as well say a famous horror film yet bears the title the film's name instead, pointing to a ghost town formerly home to a theme park. It's difficult to care about what she will find and where she will find it, and despite the fact that the film is over prior to the 80-minute point is even hit, the investigation feels tediously long. A lone highlight is a fun, unexpected role for supporting star a veteran performer.

Missing Originality and Cohesion

The director tries every trick in the book including broader genre tropes to movies he references, an expected approach from a person known as a genre enthusiast. But it never comes together or succeeds in being like something of its own, the cliched work of someone who hasn't found his own voice yet and hopes that imitating others is enough.

It's a stark contrast from the recent work of a different online personality Curry Barker, whose first full-length feature Obsession premiered at a major international event. It was a scary story produced with an even smaller budget of just $1m, but it was the definite emergence of a talent truly suited outside the restrictions of mobile filmmaking, crafted with real swagger and flair, a seamless transition of skillset between platforms. This new release is shamefully unpolished and mismatched in comparison, an incomplete half-attempt that ought not to have reached to a display larger than a phone. While the filmmaker lumbers toward an ending, it's clear that not only will he not stick the landing and he is heading for a crash, a finale of rushed incoherence that makes little to no sense and will probably lead to the wrong kind of boos this Halloween.

Final Thoughts

Despite a crowded field of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is among the most forgettable as it gets.

• The movie releases in Australian cinemas on October 23, US theaters on 24 October and in the UK on October 31.