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Tell me if you’re heard this one before – two girls and two guys are somewhere without any means of transportation, so a kindly stranger offers them a ride.  As it turns out, though, this stranger isn’t as kindly as originally expected, and soon blood is flowing, people are stabbed, shot, run over, de-fingered, and abused.

While the premise of Shuttle isn’t anything new, it’s hard to fault a film this good for a lack of originality.  Mel (Peyton List) and Jules (Cameron Goodman) are two girls just coming back from a party weekend in Mexico.  While this was supposed to be sort of a bachelorette weekend, Mel reveals upon their return that her fiance and her are no longer together – apparently he’s kind of a cheating jerk.  They run into two guys in the airport, Matt (Dave Power) and Seth (James Snyder).  Seth is kind of a party guy and starts hitting on Jules – it isn’t long before they hit it off and the two guys turn down their original ride home from the airport and ride an airport shuttle with the girls.  Also on board is accountant Andy (Cullen Douglas), who fills the role of the whiny loser.  It doesn’t take long for the shuttle driver to reveal his true intentions and the shuttle ride turns into a fight for survivial.

It’s hard to imagine that they found a way to set a suspense movie (and one that’s an hour and forty five minutes long) on a small airport shuttle, but, surprisingly, it works.  While it is guilty of some of the usual trappings (a little bit of repetition, dragging a bit, an escalated need to suspend disbelief), it compensates for its faults with good acting and genuine suspense.  You kind of know who’s going to make it to the end of the film, but still some of the deaths will catch you by surprise, and all of them are pretty grisly.

I feel like about 15/20 minutes could have probably been trimmed, but it’s hard to tell what would be a weak part of the film in need of trimming.  Even the stuff that happens, literally, to change nothing, is well done and entertaining.  It’s just hard to justify this length of film for such a small amount of story.

Still, definitely worth checking out if you’re in the mood for a suspense film with a decent amount of blood and some decent kills.  For fans of flicks like Vacancy and P2.

Paul’s Awesomeness Score – 8 out of 10!