Shellter (2009) User Reviews

Gimmie Shelter!

[gregsrants · 6/10 · 21 December 2010]

Imagine waking up to find yourself in an underground hospital room where you are informed that a viral infection as wiped out the entire populous above. That is the situation finding Zoey (Cari Sanders) when she regains consciousness and finds herself under the care of the shelter's doctor (Will Tulin). The doctor and a not-quite-right nurse suggest they are two of only a handful of survivors of the plague and that survival may involve the surgical removal of any infected area.

As the hours run long, Zoey begins to question the logic being presented. And when others show up in the shelter and are treated by the sadistic doctor, she begins to plan an escape – even if that means risking her life in the infected area above.

Shellter is written and directed by Dan Donley and has travelled the festival circuit winning Best Feature at the Fargo Fantastic Film Fest and the Phoenix Fear Film Fest while being nominated at countless others including the Dark Carnival and Oklahoma Film Festivals. The story in and of itself is brilliant. One can immediately relate to poor Zoey having no recollection of how she got there and imagine what you would do if put in the same dire circumstance. Donley is smart to not let the audience get ahead of the reveals to which Zoey must uncover throughout her stay. And the sheer futility of resistance leads to credible stretches such as Zoey taking over for the insane nurse that can no longer fulfill her duties.

Shellter does enough things right to grant a viewing but enough things wrong to keep it from elevating the interesting story premise above the norm. On the favorable side of the ledger, there is some descent gore to go along with the involving. The doctor does a good job of slicing and skinning new visitors to the shelter and the blood is not CGI'd in either.

But there were a few things that just didn't sit well with us. The lulls in the film were devastatingly boring. Although the film is listed at only 87 minutes, a further 5-7 minutes may have been shaved from the film to give it more punch power per round.

The reveal in the film's final chapters should be clear to anyone who watches films based in the genre. There was no 'wow' factor or anything outside of the obvious that requires in-depth analysis here.

Shellter is another title amongst a growing list of low budget independent horror/thriller films that do enough to keep our interest and are just a few cuts or a few additions from really rising above the crop of the ordinary. Shellter doesn't quite reach that plateau, but keep writer/director Dan Donley on your watch list. He seems to at least be on the right track, and given a bigger budget, there's no telling what he might accomplish.

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A fascinating exploration of obedience and rebellion

[channel-kdk12 · 8/10 · 30 December 2010]

Drawing loosely upon both the true stories of the Milgram experiments and Zimbardo's prison experiment, Shelter is an exploration of the ways people comply with and rebel against authority in a unfamiliar situation.

In the midst of preparing for a weekend trip Zoey is suddenly overcome with dizziness and faints. Men with gas masks move in and transfer her to an underground facility that was set up as a nuclear fallout station. Now it's being used to house the survivors of a viral outbreak that had a 99.9% kill rate. A rare few dropped into a deep coma for days before awakening, untouched by the virus.

The station is run by a bizarre and sinister doctor, who is recruiting survivors for his own plan to restore the population of the world. He treats Zoey with kindness at first, but gradually his plan to subordinate her will to his own becomes clear. The question is, will Zoey agree to help him with his plan, or rebel? Initially, the urge to rebel is quite strong. But every time he seems completely crazy, the doctor gives a logical explanation for what he is doing. The doctor keeps Zoey high on narcotics until she is addicted; she needs her rest and is overly stressed from the ordeal. He is mutilating patients, cannibalizing them for food; it's the only way to survive, and they are badly injured, would die anyway. Still, some of his behaviors are clearly outside of what is necessary and normal, and Zoey wants out.

Zoey cannot imagine what she would do if she left, however. She has seen first hand the lethal chaos that awaits outside, via the security cameras trained on the outside world. She tries to escape several times, but each time the doctor calmly talks her back into bed, and, anyway, there's nothing out there for her, except death. Outsiders come and go, all raving about the horrors outside, and the emergency broadcast system has nothing but death and destruction to offer, no hope at all.

The "training" of Zoey as his assistant gradually escalates, as he coaxes her to be an active participant, complicit in his acts. Each time, he presents his cruel solution as the only reasonable one. Zoey's drug-addled, frightened mind can do nothing but obey the twisted logic of the doctor. She willingly electrocutes a "volunteer" as part of an experiment; she holds a woman down as he performs emergency surgery on an unanesthetized patient. Soon, she is acting as his "nurse," though still constantly wavering between obedience and rebellion.

The turning point comes when one of the survivors that comes into the shelter is a man with whom Zoey "hooked up" a few months back. The doctor, sensing that the two will band against him, plays to the man's machismo, encouraging him to see woman as inferior and subordinate, giving him the power to make rules and have sex with the female survivors. The man is quickly won over by the doctor, and turns against Zoey. She electrocutes him to keep her status in the shelter. She has become a ruthless, amoral survivor.

The real experiments that this story is based on showed that ordinary people could do terrible things in high stress situations when ordered to do so by a superior. Shelter shows us, step by step, how such behavior could occur in an emergency. The relationship between the doctor and Zoey is fascinatingly complex, and the surrealistic, just-over-the-edge presentation of events works very effectively to show how a person could become a monster in a crisis. Shelter will make you ask what you would do, and will not let you off with any easy answers.

"It has a philosophy — and that's what makes it dangerous."

[jmclennan · 9/10 · 17 January 2011]

Firstly: yes, that IS how it's spelled, for reasons that will become clear once you've seen it. With that out of the way, the summary is a line from Videodrome that's appropriate here. On one level, this could be seen simply as torture-porn, with Zoey (Sanders) awakening to find herself in a underground bunker. There's been an outbreak of something very nasty above ground, it appears, and she is now trapped with a doctor (Tulin), and an apparently insane nurse. However, as events unfold, it becomes clear that it's the doctor who is the one who has all the issues here, and with the world outside out of bounds, Zoey has to decide how far she is prepared to go along with his psychotic actions, in order to survive. The answer is, much further than you would probably expect. The scene which demonstrates this most convincingly is one which explicitly evokes the infamous Milgram Experiments of the 1960's at Yale, which found out that about two-thirds of participants would inflict what they believed to be lethal electric shocks on others, at the verbal urging of an authority figure. There, of course, the 'punishment' was faked: in the depths of Das Bunker and at the crazed hands of Herr Doctor - not so much.

The 'twist' towards the end is not exactly much of a surprise - we worked it out almost at the beginning. Fortunately, this is not M. Night Shyamalan, and the movie doesn't rely on it for impact; a double twist came to mind, which would have been impressive, if pulled off. Tulin delivers a very unsettling performance, with every line and look conveying just how far gone he is beyond sanity. Sanders is less obvious, of necessity, and Zoey has much more of a character arc to play with, while the script is carefully written to work within the budgetary limitations - it's almost all set in one location. If it certainly contains its fair share of scenes that will make the viewer squirm or go "Ew!", the progression of Zoey from victim to unwilling participant to active perpetrator should also make you wonder how far you might be willing to go, given the necessary circumstances and provocation. It's probably no coincidence that the director has a master's degree in psychology - and that's why I say the film has a philosophy. This is what lifts it up above its retarded cinematic cousins, and why it'll stick in your mind when Saw VI has long been forgotten.