Imagine the kids in The Breakfast Club being chased by a monster while trapped at school, and you begin to have an idea of what’s going on in the horror film Shortcut. Throw in elements from The Goonies, Stephen King’s It, and some of the darker fairy tales you recall from childhood, and you’ve got an even clearer picture.
You just have to accept a somewhat questionable set-up: Five British high-schoolers are on a bus ride home through what looks like miles of forest land ripe for clear-cutting and a world apart from human contact. You have to wonder what kind of school the three boys and two girls attend, and where on Earth this rustic, rural road is headed. But setting aside all that, the situation is ripe for trouble, especially when the kindly bus driver, Joseph (Terence Anderson), discovers an enormous log blocking the road.
No matter; he knows a shortcut that involves taking another, even more, a backwoodsy route through the trees. While Joseph and the kids—the shy Nolan (Jack Kane), artistic Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver), obstreperous Karl (Zander Emlano), brainiac Queenie (Molly Dew), and rebel Reggie (Zak Sutcliffe)—discuss a pending lunar eclipse and rumors of a killer in the woods, they roll merrily along. Enter crazy Pedro (David Keyes), an armed, escaped convict who hijacks the bus, terrifies the students, and forces Joseph to keep driving into a narrow, dark tunnel.
That’s when Shortcut turns into an outright creature feature (Pedro, it must be said, was an unnecessary red herring), and the young characters are on their own in a warren of long-forgotten military tunnels dug into a mountain. There, with little light, they run from some ragged, reptilian thing that wants to shred them. Using their wits and an unlikely bond born from a need to cooperate and sacrifice, the kids take on the frightening demon together. Filmmaker Alessio Liguori makes up for the false note concerning Pedro by diving into the shadowy netherworld of the tunnels, where the children have to separate to fulfill their plan for survival, and where the beast roams freely.
The deeper in we get with these brave, industrious kids, the more Shortcut resembles a childlike fantasy rather than a gorefest. Photography is amazing, given that most of the action is shot by candlelight and a flashlight. And the young actors become increasingly appealing as their characters come out of their shells to unite against a dark force. Despite a few problems in the film’s first half-hour, Shortcut is terrific fun.