Reviewing Shallow Grave In The VHS Era

And you kids consider Blu-rays old hat...

Whatever the ups and downs of my writing career, I started out with a real piece of good fortune. For both my first and my second proper gigs saw me contributing to books: respectively The Rough Guide To Rock and The Crime Time Film Book.

Alas, said contributions have aged about as well as I have. That said, it’s quite funny to find yourself reviewing films in a format that has been dead for almost a quarter of a century. Such was the case with my Shallow Grave appreciation for the CTFB (as all the kids were calling it). In fact, the piece begins with a direct reference to what we unironically referred to as ‘the video age’…

With the availability of video, the added intimacy of a home-based medium allows you to grasp exactly what it is about Shallow Grave that makes it work so well. A major reason for the film’s success is the simplicity of its storyline: a new flatmate dies leaving a suitcase full of dosh, the three other housemates decide to bury the body and keep the loot, and then all hell breaks loose. No tricks, the right number of red herrings: the recipe’s old and easy-to-follow but is none the worse for either of these things.