Director – Andrew Jones, Screenplay – John Klyza, Producers – Lee Bane, Becky Graham, Robert Graham, Andrew Jones & Jonathan Willis, Photography – Jonathan McLaughlin, Music – Bobby Cole, Makeup Effects – Amanda Husk, Production Design – Felicity Boylett. Production Company – North Bank Entertainment.
Cast
Terri Dwyer (Sue), Harriet Rees (Tina), Brendee Green (Sheila), Lee Bane (Marty), Gareth Lawrence (Bo), Sean Rhys James (Johnny), Derek Nelson (Dana), Linny Bushey (Marilyn), Ryan Michaels (The Sheriff), Jason Homewood (The Deputy), Jevan White (Justin), Alexander Bradwell (Ricky), Lucas Bradwell (Greg)
Plot
April 11, 1981. Sue and her five children have moved to a new home at Cabin 28 in the town of Keddie, California. One evening, there are knocks at the door. Masked strangers then break in and subject the family to a brutal and violent assault.
Andrew Jones is a Welsh director/producer who has had a more than reasonable output through the 2010s up until his death in 2023. He started out with two troubled teen films Teenage Wasteland (2006) and The Feral Generation (2007) and subsequently joined the horror genre making the likes of The Amityville Asylum (2013), The Midnight Horror Show (2014), Valley of the Witch (2014), A Haunting at the Rectory (2015), The Last House on Cemetery Lane (2015), Poltergeist Activity (2015), The Curse of Robert the Doll (2015), Robert the Doll (2015), The Exorcism of Anna Ecklund (2016), The Toymaker (2017), Werewolves of the Third Reich (2017), Jurassic Predator (2018), The Legend of Halloween Jack (2018), The Legend of Robert the Doll (2018), The Curse of Halloween Jack (2019), Robert Reborn (2019), The Haunting of Margam Castle (2020), A Killer Next Door (2020) and Alien: Battlefield Earth (2021). He has also produced and written Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection (2012) and Silent Night: The Homecoming (2013).
Cabin 28 joins a number of Jones’ later films that turned towards taking up True Crime stories, as with the likes of Bundy and the Green River Killer (2018), The Manson Family Massacre (2019), The Utah Cabin Murders (2019) and The Jonestown Haunting (2020).
In this case, Cabin 28 is based on the unsolved murders of Sue Sharp, two of her children and her son’s friend in Keddie, California on April 11, 1981. Sue had relocated to the small California town with her five children after separating from her husband and rented Cabin 28 at the Keddie Resort. The following morning their bodies were found in the house, having been bound, brutally beaten and stabbed to death. Three of her children were found unharmed in one of the bedrooms. The murders remain unsolved to this day, where at most the sheriff’s department suspected a neighbour.
The masked home invaders who were apparently taking their inspiration from The Strangers back in 1981
Andrew Jones replicates the basic details of the Keddie Murders with reasonable faithfulness – there are equivalents of all the characters, the cabin (although shooting never went beyond Jones’s home turf in Wales to anywhere near California) and the two main suspects even if the film doesn’t come out and directly name them as the killers. Andrew Jones offers no answers as to what happened, not even any theories.
On the other hand, when it comes to what actually happened at the cabin on the night in question, Jones takes a dive off the deep end. Here Jones construes what happened in terms of a
Home Invasion assault but all that he does is reach to the most prominent Home Invasion work in recent memory – The Strangers (2008). While it is not clear exactly what happened in Keddie in 1981, what I am fairly certain of was that Sue Sharp and her children were not harassed and attacked by a group of people wearing animal and clown masks. The Home Invasion aspect takes place without any real tension or of Jones doing anything to push the material. As such, Cabin 28 quickly falls into the forgettable.
