A faith-based horror film that starts out interestingly but gets more and more bogged down in heavy-handed symbolism, THE SHELTER is a virtual one-man-show for star Michael Paré who went from leads in EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS, STREETS OF FIRE, and THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT and a respectable DTV career in the nineties to a more recent career resurgence as a character actor and Uwe Boll (IN THE NAME OF THE KING) regular. A man who had it all brought down low after the suicide of his pregnant wife, derelict Thomas abandons all hope at a bar called "The Gates" - rejecting the invitation to confess his sins to a bartender with a friendly ear and the offer of shelter for the night at a church - and experiences a bit of makeshift stigmata when he steps on a tack on the sidewalk of a house set back from the road. Finding the door unlocked, Thomas finds the house empty but not abandoned. With a fully-stocked fridge and liquor cabinet, a working television, and hot water, Thomas settles in for the night. The house's stranger amenities - empty picture frames, bibles with blank pages ("Somebody got gypped"), strange sounds, lighters that self-extinguish their hellfire whenever Thomas tries to light a cigarette, strange sounds from a locked room inscribed in blood with the symbol for infinity - do not disturb Thomas until reminders of his troubled marriage, his infidelity, his wife's death and unborn child are no longer just part of his dreams and hallucinations. He soon realizes that the house has no plans to let him leave, but are his visions increasingly realistic visions of himself living happily with his wife and grown daughter a means of confronting his guilt and moving on or a demonic trick to push him towards suicide and damnation?