Shivers Down Your Spine – review

Director: Mathew Kister

Release date: 2015

Contains spoilers

Shivers Down your Spine is a portmanteau film that you can track down on DVD but the VoD through Amazon has never really been forthcoming (the film appears but you cannot rent/buy it at the time of review).

It is one with some length – weighing in at over two hours – and unusually seems to have been created with a purpose in mind – rather than just stringing some independently filmed shorts together.

It begins with the portmanteau and a guy (Steve Eaton) is making a mini-pizza but when the microwave dings the pizza is gone and a lamp is in its place. He rubs it and the genie, Sabihah (Megan Shepard), appears. After nearly wasting a wish getting her to cover her boobs up (she gives him that one for free) he appears somewhat uninterested in the wishes per se and eventually gets her to (for one wish) tell him a series of stories – 9 in all. The one we are concerned with is Convention Girl.

Steve Eaton as Justin

In it, Justin (again Steve Eaton) is woken when his friend David (T.J Roe) calls him and asks him to come to his hotel room. The friends are at a horror convention and, responding to David’s insistence, Justin asks whether he has killed a prostitute (Ali Aguilar). When he gets there that is exactly what has happened. David explains, however, that she wasn’t just that. He had met her in the bar, flashed cash and she had come to his room. Once there, however, she had bared fangs and attacked.

staked

David pulls back the covers to reveal she has been staked in the heart – leading Justin to question how David happened to have a stake. Justin does not believe a word of it... If she had fangs (which she no longer does) then they’re at a horror convention – clearly they’d be fake. He wants to call the cops but David has a sure-fire way of proving things… all he needs to do is remove the stake…

memories of her fangs

This was one of the shortest of the stories and, to be honest, the weakest. It had less story than others and less comedy (although not all the shorts have a comedy element, some do and this was meant to be a comedic piece). In fact much of the dialogue seems unnatural in this one and the delivery is just a tad off. It feels more filler than thriller and that’s a shame because, despite being a real budget creation, some of the shorts work really well and this is actually a good portmanteau film when the shorts work. In the case of Convention Girl, however, it didn’t really. As always, the score is for the vampire section only and so 3 out of 10 does not reflect my view of the full experience.

The imdb page is here.