Shuttle is one of the most misogynistic, mean-
spirited,
and out-and-out dumb horror movies ever filmed. The premise certainly
isn’t high-concept gold: An evil airport shuttle driver tormenting his
fares? Seriously? Shuttle screenwriter/
director Edward
Anderson must’ve watched a marathon of Hostel and Saw movies and decided he was going to try to out-everything them with his
Short Bus of Terror. The derivative, unoriginal result would be
laughable if it weren’t so goddamned cruel.
Mel (Peyton List, unexceptional but serviceable) and Jules (Cameron
Goodman, ditto), a couple of airhead girlfriends returning from a
vacation in Mexico, board the death shuttle. Two frat boys, desperate
for nookie—”Man, have I got the yellow fever,” one of them sneers
as he slobbers over some Asian girls—also wheedle their way on.
Soon, the shuttle’s driver (Tony Curran, overwhelmed by his one-note
role) begins picking his passengers off one by one. They escape from
the shuttle! They’re back in the shuttle! The story continues this way
for an hour. Then it drags on for another 40 minutes until it blatantly
steals Hostel‘s big idea for the final twist.
This is the kind of movie where the bad guy picks a victim with a
menacing “Duck… Duck… GOOSE!” It’s the kind of movie where a
character complains about the shuttle taking a detour onto Martin
Luther King Jr. Way by saying, “I just left a third-world country; I
don’t need a tour of the hood!” And it’s the kind of movie that
demonstrates two characters’ friendship by having one of those
characters say, “We’ve only been best friends for like 10 million
years!” They’re not even annoying enough that you pray for them to die,
in classic horror-movie fashion; the film is so bad and goddamned cruel
that you hope it becomes the worst-grossing film of all time so that
everybody involved never works in Hollywood again. 