Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Not be confused with Danny Boyle's A SHALLOW GRAVE, this low-budget horror flick centers around a series of murders in a small town. A sheriff's office is shutting down and preparing to relocate when a bloodied teen walks in the door. The revelation of his identity only makes things more confusing. It is hard to say more about this movie without giving it all away. Suffice it to say SHALLOW GROUND involves restless spirits and their thirst for revenge. The first half has some wonderfully unsettling and occasionally scary moments. The second half loses some momentum, although the killer's identity comes as a neat surprise and pays homage to Hitchcock in its own twisted way. The supernatural elements are kept to a minimum, which works in the movie's favor. Horror film fans will have seen the plot before, but may appreciate the clever way in which it is presented. The acting is hit or miss at best, and the movie is extremely bloody. It deals pretty graphically with torture-murders, so the little ones should be in bed before you watch this.

This is the much lauded Shallow Ground---I heard a lot about this one a few years ago when I first started watching these kinds of movies. So, the basic premise is, this naked kid shows up covered in blood at this backwoods sheriff's office, and all hell breaks loose. A lot of stuff about the dead coming back for revenge, etc, etc, nothing that new. It's not a bad horror flick, but I can't say it lives up to the hype poured on it on the front cover or the critics. It's got some good scares, and it seems like something you'd want to watch around Halloween, that sort of thing. There's lots of gore and the first twenty minutes of the movie are very interesting and creepy. And the acting is alright, as well as the directing. The supernatural elements of the story and the revenge stuff was well done overall.But, the ending sucked, and most of the movie seems really...pointless, makes you scratch your head. A lot of things aren't properly explained, such as the back story behind the whole thing, and you get confused a lot. The plot is built up a lot, and that's good, but it all gets mushy and unclear after a while, which ruins it. They focused way too much on giving us bloody, naked men and beautiful women stripped nude and tied to trees, and on the gore, and they didn't seem to care about the story they were giving us. A lot of it didn't stick with me as memorable, either, which is not a good sign. So it turned out as half baked crap. Thus why I'm not spending too much time on this review, either. This movie lives up to it's name...it's shallow ground, little to no substance at all.PS, the trailers before the movie were some of the worst put together trailers I have ever seen. Screen Media Films should be ashamed.

"Shallow Ground" is a hugely underwhelming film when it could've been a pleasant surprise.**SPOILERS**Turning in for the night, Deputies Stuart Dempsey, (Stan Kirsch) and Laura Russell, (Lindsey Stoddart) are leaving their remote sheriff's station for good when a , (Rocky Marquette) walks in, naked and covered in blood. His appearance sparks Sheriff Jack Shepard, (Timothy V. Murphy) to resolve a year-old missing person's case that has plagued the community. As the clues begin to come together and a mystery about the boy is found regarding his connection to a slew of missing person cases in the area. As the mystery deepens and more bodies turn up, they race to solve the mystery and find the killer before another strike is had.The Good News: This wasn't that bad, and there are certain parts that aren't that bad. One of the best features is that as the film progresses, the mystery deepens. It's not that clever or complicated, but it's something we simply cannot predict or unravel on our own and it leaves us feeling off-balance from the beginning. Just when we begin to think we know what's going on, it throws us off the scent. Not that bad. It also works as a really great gore-fest. We get mangled corpses with hooks pieced into their flesh, a carved-in face, a slashed chest, gun shot wounds, a hand slipping under one's skin, a ripped out heart and more. Even more is thrown in with the fact that blood plays an initial component in the creepiness in the beginning, as a pool of blood creeping under the door and turning direction in one creepy instance. The effects were mostly of a practical nature and are well done. It also packs in a constant stream of strange images, such as the naked boy bleeding from his eyes and mouth or covered in blood, or at one point in spiders, the boy's fingerprints turning out to each be one of the missing people in the area, and a deputy managing to tear up photos of the missing people and finding that they form into a composite image of the boy. Pretty creepy and well-done, but otherwise, there wasn't much else.The Bad News: There are a couple of problems with the film, and it mostly stems from the fact that it really doesn't make you want to care what happens. Everything passes by in a so-what manner, and after a while it just reverts to a series of incidents that make you question why it's still going on. My biggest problem with it was that it started giving some answers way too late into the game. So for the longest time, it was frustrating as the chain of events had nothing to hold to. It eventually almost forces you to give up on the narrative about halfway through and found myself struggling to care about what was happening. The other complaint is that none of it makes any sense at all. It's said that he has comes back to seek retribution on the killer, but then the bulk of the film take place in the police station with the boy sitting there manifesting blood and the like, and it's revealed the police station has nothing to do with the murders so it's just a large chunk of screen-time eaten up without accomplishing anything. There is the confused sense that all of this seems to be happening for purposes of vengeance, but none of this is really made clear at all. It is also not entirely clear why the killer is going around tying people up in the woods and killing them. There is no explanation of why the dead seem to be coming back everywhere. This is compounded by a never-ending stream of plot-holes that are so easy to find it's almost an insult. If the boy is a composite of the murdered dead, then why is he targeting people who are not connected to the killings? A trained forensic expert can tell at first glance if blood is human or animal, but can't discern if the blood cells are dead or not. Don't get me started on the killer's "slim fast" motive. I didn't buy it, it was way too thin to come close to justifying the beyond-insane and sexually deviant actions. This was a gigantic missed opportunity.The Final Verdict: As a gruesome gore-fest, it's not that bad, but as an engaging horror film, it fails remarkably. It's a shame, as it had a lot of potential and promise, but it's ruined by a largely uncaring feel and too many plot holes to really ignore. If it sounds like something that appeals to you instead of the standard grain, go for it, but if not, seek caution with it.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity, and some Language

I could spend all night picking apart why this movie is so terrible. Unfortunately, it's not worth the effort. Let's just say the characters are one-dimensional, the story is confused and contorted beyond all imagining, and the dialog is inane. Added to this, when the story does finally begin to make some sense in the end, a brand new evil appears out of the woods, apparently unrelated to anything else in the movie, and destroys whatever cohesive thought the movie had. I rented this movie based on the glowing reviews on the case. Note to self: Never rent a movie recommended by The Montreal Mirror or Horrorview.com. "Home Media Retailing" says it delivers an "intelligent, terrifying story." No, it doesn't. Saw II, for example, could never be accused of having an "intelligent" story - but it is about a hundred times as intelligent as this thing.Practically every scene features something unbelievable. Not "Oh wow, that's so gross it's unbelievable!", but "nobody would ever say/do that, that's unbelievable!" And the movie doesn't seem to know whether its a supernatural thriller, a "dawn of the dead" movie or a murder mystery. Maybe it thinks it is some of each. In fact, it's just an amateurish stew of competing, dumb plot lines. The movie mostly doesn't make any sense, and when it does, it's predictable and silly.