The Bad Shepherd — The Bad Shepherd(VOD)

‘The Bad Shepherd’, a new suspense horror thriller directed by Geo Santini debuts in the UK on 22nd April.

In the movie a group of friends accidentally run over a woman (Courtney Blythe Turk), killing her.  They find her in possession of a gun and a bag containing roughly a million dollars.  Tensions erupt within the group, bystanders are killed to keep them quiet and the situation is exacerbated by the arrival of a stranger (the director Santini) claiming ownership of the money and displaying an impossible amount of knowledge about the friends.

The basic plot kernel is the familiar one of a group of innocents discovering a cache of wealth and later having to deal with the cache’s previous dangerous owners.  This is the plot motor of recent classics like Danny Boyle’s ‘Shallow Grave’ (1994) and Sam Raimi’s ‘A Simple Plan’ (1998).  The difference here is that the stranger, who calls himself Sidney is an ambiguous and disconcerting presence who, in addition to his unlikely knowledge of the group carries no gun yet seems strangely conceited about his own safety.

Santini combines gritty characterization and a wintry landscape (rather like in ‘A Simple Plan’) and does not allow the supernatural elements to overbalance the realistic ones.  The gang of four friends, John (Scotty Tover), Paul (Christos Kalabogias), Leonard (Justin Taite) and Travis (Britt Zimmerman) are effective as working or lower middle-class blue collar men struggling to get by.  They’re not pretty in the routine Hollywood way and give off a convincing aura of desperation.  When John starts to embrace violence and justifies it because his $250,000 cut will rescue him from economic insecurity it makes sense.  Santini has cast himself in the plum role of the mysterious interloper Sidney.  With his tailored suit and turtleneck and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc southern fried accent Santini is clearly having fun but the character remains authentically sinister.  The film contains enough plot and character developments to keep audience's attention focused throughout and maintains a powerful suspense until the end.

Professional critics have been savage about the film, one calling it “absurd” and with particular scorn reserved for Santini’s admittedly showy performance.  Audience response, however, has been mostly positive with respectable percentage scores on online sites.  There has been a lot of criticism of the movie’s ultimate twist with many calling it predictable.  This is unfair as the point here is not whodunit but rather which-twist-is-it.  With Sidney’s impossible omniscience and passionate monologues about the thrill of the hunt, there are only a number of possible somewhat related outcomes. 

Ultimately ‘The Bad Shepherd’ is a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode skillfully expanded to feature length.  Its mixture of hardscrabble environment and supernatural elements even recall the work of TZ scribe Manly Wade Wellman.

I would say ignore the naysayers and give this movie a chance.  It is an excellent suspense piece and a generally rewarding experience.