Actor Sung Kang (Han from the Fast and Furious franchise) makes his directorial debut with this horror comedy, which reportedly harkens back to the cheesy genre films from the 80’s. Specifically, the films that would sometimes feature a mishmash of monsters. That’s what Kang attempts to recreate with Shaky Shivers—a movie that promises “a night of werewolves, zombies and ice cream.” That all sounds fine and dandy, but unfortunately, the execution isn’t quite as good or as fun as it could’ve been.

The story follows a couple friends (Lucy and Karen) working their normal shift at an ice cream shop one night, when an irate old homeless woman attacks and curses one of them into becoming a wolf. Lucy—now fearing she may turn into a werewolf—decides to go out in her own terms, so she and her friend Karen drive out to an abandoned camp (as one often does when turning into a werewolf), where they’ll find out once and for all if she’ll turn, and if she does, Karen is ready with a gun and some silver-painted bullets (that still counts right?).

The whole movie is essentially just the two girls bumbling their way through one thing after the other, where on top of the werewolf thing, they also somehow manage to resurrect the dead (thanks to a binder full of spells left behind by an old ex-boyfriend), which is just one other thing they must now deal with. Oh, and Bigfoot makes a random appearance in the movie, because why not?

As fun as this movie sounds, it's actually much slower than it needed to be, making you really feel the pacing issues. This is mainly due to most of the movie being nothing but dialogue and silly banter between the two leads, with the monster stuff very few and far between. I also found the comedic aspects more amusing than funny and being a horror comedy, if the comedy doesn’t quite work then you’re left with whatever else the film offers and, in this case, not much. Though, comedy is subjective, so I can’t completely knock it for that.

On the positive side, the girls were semi-amusing at times and there are some decent practical makeup effects (mainly the interesting look for the zombies), but sadly that’s about it. Additionally, since the filmmakers wanted this to be a movie you can “share with the family” there isn’t much in terms of blood and gore, which is something it could’ve benefited from.

In fact, much of what goes on in the movie just felt like they were padding the time, because next to many scenes being nothing but dialogue but new elements are introduced only to be quickly eliminated shortly after. All this ultimately leads up to a pretty half-assed climax. The movie just felt like a long and lazy episode of Goosebumps, which some may enjoy, I’m just not one of them.