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Cast: Dave Franco, Andrew Seeley, Shannon Woodward
When Derek moves to a new town and discovers a shortcut through the woods to his high school, he learns about a crazy old man who lives near its path: Legend has it that he abducted a group of teenagers years ago. Ignoring the warning, Derek and his friends set out to uncover the dark secret that's buried deep in the woods. But will they survive to tell it?
Adam Sandler is branching off his Happy Madison Productions and has created the Scary Madison Productions label and yes you guessed it these will be horror flicks. The Shortcut is the first to be released off the label and it was co-written by Scott Sandler(Adam's brother). I found this to be one mostly of those "by the book" PG-13 horror flicks we seen time after time in in theaters but I got to say though that I did find this to be some what original and it brought some new ideas to the table as well. The acting was all very good by the young cast, each one played their characters out very well and made them as believable as possible for a horror flick. One bonus here is the addition of veteran actor, Raymond Barry, he can play so many different characters and brings a lot of experience to the film. Certainly not ground-breaking but still a very entertaining film with a few nice twists along the way and one big one at the end which I thought made for a great finish and it leaves the film open in case they might want to do a sequel. Also before I forget, another nice thing I like about the film was the use of flashbacks. There are several characters in the film and a few are a bit hard to keep track of but the use of the flashbacks helped out nicely and were short enough not to distract from the present day story. As far as straight to video horror flicks go this was a pretty entertaining one that supplies some good suspense, gore and a few scares along the way as well. I look forward to more films from Scary Madison, this is a good start. lets hope we continue to see some good films coming from it. For now though I recommend The Shortcut to any fan of slasher films, it will make for some nice viewing on Halloween as well. The DVD comes with Special Features that include:
Audio Commentary with Director Nicholaus Goossen
Trailer
Released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. *** 1/2 Out Of *****