The Shrine

Starring: Aaron Ashmore, Cindy Sampson, & Meghan Heffern

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

We see it over and over again with Horror, a film with a decent storyline, starts out great, and quickly descends into a pointless mess of blood and guts. The Shrine was a film I really wanted to like. I was intrigued by the Netflix description, and had they stuck with that story, maybe this one would have been a winner, unfortunately they didn't. The Shrine starts out by telling us of a student backpacking through Europe, who goes missing in the small town of Alvania, Poland. Some reporters from his hometown get a whiff of the story and start poking around, only to find out that no one in the town is particularly interested in trying to find this kid, that's when the reports decide the only thing they can do is go there and look for him themselves. With films like Saw and The Offspring, the gore was absolutely necessary and added to the story, in The Shrine, it takes away from what was already a pretty good story. The small town was creepy and the story really played to peoples fear of disappearing without a trace, while on vacation. The film may have been a little bit slow moving, but it was very intense and interesting until the last forty-five minutes. That's when it goes demonic and becomes nothing but one bloody body after another. For me, films like the Shrine are the most disappointing of all, because the writers didn't believe in their story and ultimately destroy it in order to get more viewers. The demonic slaughterhouse may have appealed to a larger audience, but it certainly didn't make this a better film.