Review of Shadow Puppets (2007) by Josh G — 21 Aug 2008

Shadow Puppets is, predictably, not a very good movie. A convoluted plot, horrible acting (especially on the part of Jolene Blalock), and uncertainty of what direction to go in are the biggest problems with the movie.

We open with Kate (Blalock) waking up in an insane asylum, screaming. Kate doesn't know that her name is Kate yet, doesn't know how she wound up in an insane asylum, or why she is in her underwear (underwear = shirt and shorts). The place is dark and eerie, but she walks down the hall and finds another guy, Jack, who also does not know who he is or why he is there.

It turns out, though, that there is a monster lurking in the darkness: a shadow monster. This creature is made of shadows, which means that it can leap off of the wall and impale you with one of its Wolverine-esque claws, but you cannot touch it. Awesome!

Kate & Jack meet up with a few other people who they find hiding out in the hospital. Or is it a prison? In an example of the movie's wonderful dialogue, Kate muses: "Maybe both." One of the people they find is a woman who is swimming nude in a the hospital/prison's swimming pool. This is the extent of the nudity in the movie, and it's completely unnecessary. The reason that this woman was swimming is not really explained, but whatever. Let's move on.

A lot of the movie consists of our rag-tag group of prisoners/patients moving around in shadowy corridors looking for a way out and describing exactly what is on the screen in ridiculous detail. The worst offender is a scene in which they hear a telephone ringing.

"Do you hear that? That's a telephone!" one character says.

"We need to get to that telephone!" another character says.

And when the telephone stops ringing, somebody has the audacity to say: "It's stopped ringing.".

I'm pretty positive that there is another scene where the characters are trying to get through a locked door while saying both "The door's locked!" and "We need to get through the door!".

Maybe they were reading the directions in the script, rather than their lines. I'm surprised one of the characters didn't blurt out, "The camera pans down the hallway as Kate looks fearfully toward the darkness. She breathes a sigh of relief when she realizes that it was only Jack who she had heard coming toward her!".

I don't know whether the origins of the shadow monster are really explained. Something about it being made from memories, maybe? There are a few deaths, almost all of which are yawn-worthy.

One of the characters (I won't tell you which one) turns out to be the evil scientist/doctor/prison warden(?) who did the memory-wiping experiments on the others. The character explains that the shadow monster seems to be attracted to people with their memories intact and to people wearing clothing. What this leads to is a few scenes of people yelling: "Take off your clothes!" But in this movie, taking off your clothes equals wearing just your shirt and shorts 'underwear'. Man, if I made this movie, every single one of the characters would be fully nude from the opening shot. Regardless, the "take off your clothes" idea doesn't even work because the shadow monster sees you and attacks you anyway.

Alright, knowing that the shadow monster is hurt by light, and knowing that the characters are trying to get out of this building, can you guess how the monster is stopped? Give it a second, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Which sucks. Why is the movie content with being that lame? It doesn't even bother with having a fake-out ending where the monster returns unexpectedly: it just ends. It just goes to the credits.

Shadow Puppets could have been worse, I guess, but it's still remarkably bad. Terrible dialogue, uninteresting action, a bad ending, and hardly any nudity. One of the characters is a nymphomaniac, and there's not even a single sex scene!

If you're going to make a bad horror movie without cool sex and/or death scenes, then why even bother in the first place?