Moving beyond his iconic role as Han in the Fast and Furious franchise, Sung Kang surprises audiences by choosing a dark comedy as the chosen vehicle for his directorial debut, “Shaky Shivers.” The film follows two young women who, fearing a witch’s curse, find themselves at an abandoned summer camp, trying to figure out if one of them is about to turn into a werewolf, while encountering ’80s-era horror creatures and relying on a spell book to save the day.
Written by Andrew McAllister and Aaron Strongoni, the movie clearly intends not to scare but to entertain. It generates laughs with very mild character development, punctuated with a slew of silly running jokes and a chaotic display of dark comedy. After writing several scripts and reading hundreds more, Kang finally decided to take on this hybrid genre written by friends because “it had a great balance of horror and comedy, and it brought me right back to my VHS-renting childhood.”
With Kang at its helm behind the camera, the movie manages a few frights with some dim-witted antics, merging wacky dialogue with weird, wildly fun scenes for smooth storytelling about an unbreakable friendship between two women.
With Bigfoot, a werewolf, zombies, a swarm of masked cultists, and a mysterious witch doling out unintelligible curses, “Shaky Shivers” brings to life classic horror flick creatures from the ’80s in this lo-fi, campy 78-minute reunion of sorts. Initially billed as a lycanthropic movie, the film isn’t the kind of horror comedy I initially expected. With monstrous action sporadic and spread out, and much screen time occupied by the unusual friendship of two women caught in a bizarre dilemma, it is nostalgic and deliciously old school in style and pace, with minimal to no special effects. The film offers a largely refreshing and intentional approach in terms of simpler filmmaking techniques, pacing (think “Twin Peaks”), and dry humor, and take on an otherwise predictable storyline.
After…
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