Parents' Guide to Shortcut

This monster tale is by no means good in the traditional sense, but it's scrappy, late-night, popcorn-munching, guilty fun, driven by DIY teen power, old-fashioned scares, and creepy music. Shot in Italy (like so many other low-budget horror classics), Shortcut has virtually nothing in it that hasn't been used in hundreds of horror movies before. It makes mistakes (a "total lunar eclipse" is mentioned prominently at the beginning and then forgotten), and it's sometimes silly. But it's a pleasingly compact, simple idea with just a few characters, locations, and props. It also has that special spirit of a movie made by and for horror fans, on the cheap, using ingenuity, duct tape, and bailing wire to hold it all together.

Shortcut does make the shameful misstep of reviving that old cliché of killing a Black character first. Another unfortunate stereotype involves the overweight Karl, who behaves in a way that's meant to be seen as cowardly and always talks about food. But on the whole, the teen characters are a spirited, Goonies/Stranger Things-like bunch. Often in movies like this, we get a batch of "types" who wouldn't actually be friends in real life, but this time the grouping at least makes sense, since they're all stuck riding the bus together. The partly lit tunnels (with eerie patterns of light) are an inspired location, the practical monster is actually pretty scary, and the pulsing, electronic score of course recalls favorite classics of the 1970s and '80s. Best of all, Shortcut moves fast and light enough that it makes its flaws easy to shrug off.