[Film Review] Shaky Shivers (2022)

If you can’t count on your best friend to check your teeth and hands and stand vigil with you all night to make sure you don’t wolf out, who can you count on? And so begins our story on anything but an ordinary night in 1993, on the outskirts of an abandoned summer camp site that legend says was the site of some pretty grisly murders. “Oh my god shut up Karen, it just went like bankrupt or something and shut down.”

This is the comic and heartfelt joy of Shaky Shivers; the give and take between what one would generally call serious issues like dealing with a childhood offset by an alcoholic mother or a future interrupted by incoming werewolf tendencies and the dark humor only a pair of best girl friends since childhood could muster. Like accidentally shooting a coworker in the face and then magnanimously allowing him to spy on them in the bathroom from heaven. Number ones and twos.

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Lucy (Brooke Markham) and Karen (Vyvy Nguyen) spend their days slinging ice cream and resenting having to use the customer service voice on terrible patrons. Lucy vicariously fulfills the wish of all retail workers by denying a somewhat odd customer one night and unfortunately finds herself bitten by the skull puppet of a witch and cursed to become a devil wolf of a night. They go about dealing with it in the way anyone would before the days of the Internet and the lush occult information we have at our hands now; getting a random Dungeons and Dragons spell book from the brother of a weird ex who may or may not have joined a cult.  Mayhem ensues because as resourceful as the girls are—like when Lucy confiscates her parents’ fluffy bedroom handcuffs so Karen can subdue her if needed—they weren’t exactly setting the world afire before this all happened.

It's their friendship that ultimately saves them from manslaughter, the witch woman, and her woodland cult creatures, and even bitchy customers. No matter how much of a couple of losers they might be, and think and say so multiple times, one of them always pushes the other to be more. Often in that exasperating way that best friends do that make you want to accidentally turn them into a zombie. 

Directed by Sung Kang of The Fast and the Furious universe, Shaky Shivers celebrates every over-the-top trope of horror by actually trying to cram every over-the-top horror trope of horror into its short run time. A resurrection and a Bigfoot also make cameos. It kind of shoots and misses when trying to create a cohesive story but it does have that certain charm that one can grudgingly make excuses for. Like when the girls are desperate to find a cure for Lucy’s wolfism and open right to the spell. “Wasn’t that convenient?”  A lot in this story is incredibly convenient, but this isn’t a movie to take seriously when your claim to high school fame is shitting your pants running cross country. Sorry, track. If you’re going to make fun of them, get the facts right. They may be hot messes, but they own it and so does the movie.

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