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Outtakes

Prey for Her

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Saint Clare

by Adam Barney

Clare (Bella Thorne, The Babysitter) is a college student who believes she is on a mission from God. Blessed with visions, she hunts down the men who prey on the women in her small town. Detective Timmons (Ryan Phillippe, Cruel Intentions, MacGruber) grows suspicious of her extra-curricular activities as she keeps turning up in the wrong places.

Guided by the ghost of Mailman Bob (Frank Whaley, Pulp Fiction), the first man she inadvertently killed, Clare begins to connect the dots on who’s behind the growing number of local women who have gone missing. Bob is a messenger from the beyond and he seeks to keep Clare centered on her righteous path of vengeance.

Saint Clare is based on the YA novel Clare at Sixteen by Don Ruff. A quick search yields book reviews that frequently compare the Clare Bleecker series to Dexter, the popular show that is still churning out sequel and spin-off seasons. It’s easy to see why – Clare is a serial killer who only pursues other killers and she has conversations with a dead person from her past who acts as her conscious.

Thorne delivers a solid performance as the melancholy Clare, but the rest of the film around her is tonal mess. It really feels like a pilot episode with the season finale tacked on as the final fifteen minutes. There are a lot of story threads and elements, like a goofy school play, that are introduced but dumped quickly in favor of rushing toward the ending. The film is uninterested in exploring its own central mystery of the missing women, Clare is simply propelled to the wrong doers by convenience. 

Co-writer and director Mitzi Peirone (Braid) provides a few moments that visually pop as the world around Clare becomes more colorful and otherworldly, but they are too few and far in between.

Saint Clare never quite picks a lane. It’s a revenge tale without a strong motive, it’s a mystery that isn’t remotely interested in the investigation, and it’s a supernatural fable that is too grounded and serious for its own good.

Shudder Premiere, Slider

Shed’s Dead, Baby

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The Shed

by Hope Madden

The 2008 film Deadgirl tested me. Boasting solid performances across the board, it told of a bullied teen who pined for the bully’s girlfriend. He and his even more damaged best friend find a monster, which one sees as a curse and the other sees as a gift. The resulting 95 minutes took me three tries to complete, not because it was scary or gross or troubling, but because it was unwatchably hateful.

Co-writer/director Frank Sabatella builds The Shed on similar terrain.

Stan (Jay Jay Warren), still stuck on his middle school crush Roxy (Sofia Happonen), is in trouble at school, with the sheriff’s department, and with his abusive grandfather, not to mention the local bullies—who have a real field day with his best friend Dommer (Cody Kostro).

So far so familiar, but Sabatella zigs when you think he’ll zag in a couple of important ways. The monster in question—that thing stuck in the shed, at least until sundown—used to be his neighbor, Mr. Bane (Frank “Big Brain on Brad” Whaley, nice to see you).

What Sabatella mines with just a handful of excellent, tense, gory scenes is a certain isolated, rural anxiety. He mixes childhood terrors with adolescent angst with smalltown rebellion with something aching and lonely. All of it, in these few scenes, speaks to something authentic in terms of wrong-side-of-the-tracks coming of age.

Everything else is borrowed, from the Night of the Living Dead and Fright Night, that old Michael Fassbender Nazi zombie thing Cold Creek and, of course, the morally bankrupt Deadgirl. Maybe just a touch of Stakeland.

Still, it’s fun.

Kostro is particularly effective as the best friend who’s far more f’ed up than Stan realizes and Warren offers a strong emotional center to the film. There are about a dozen too many nightmare sequences and the end is simply nonsense, but for horror fans, it’s not a bad time.