Shadow Puppets
 Rufus  rates it:    Community rates it: (no ratings yet)
   138 of 273 readers found this review helpful.

Imagine if you will, waking up in a strange place in your underwear. You have no idea how you got there or remember who you are. You walk a few feet to find one hot woman also in her underwear. Like you, she also doesn’t remember her name or who she is. To some of you out there this would be a normal Sunday morning when we were all in college. Now imagine something in the shadows wanting to kill you. I take that back. Not only IN the shadows, but IS the shadows. This is the premise for Shadow Puppets.

A group of people wake up wearing matching underwear in an asylum looking place. They have no memories of how they got there or who they are. They begin to try and find a way out and also figure out who they are. The mystery of why they can’t remember who they are begins to unfold and on top of that, they have to fight for their lives against a shadow creature that uses the dark to kill people. Tensions among the group mount and with all the craziness going on around them, they begin to turn against each other. The premise is pretty good, but unfortunately the execution begins to fall apart towards the end.

I do not want to ruin the mystery of how they got there, what the monster is or who the captives are so this might be a short little diddy of a review. James Marsters is pretty good in his role, along with the support of the gorgeous Jolene Blalock. Both play their roles well enough. We also get genre fave Tony Todd in his normal role of tough as nails criminal. I was disappointed in his role. Not because Todd did a bad job, but he just wasn’t given much to work with.

The film starts interesting enough and even works the viewer into wanting to figure out what the hell is going on. Once the movie explains the mystery of what’s going on it just crumbled my viewing pleasure. Where this film definitely lost me was when the shadow showed a CGI face. Damn them. As a monster moving the shapes of the shadows or impaling a man from the wall itself, it was effective and shall I impressive. Once it started flying around and had a damn face to it, it lost me. What started as a claustrophobic mystery with an unseen killer after the inmates soon became a simple monster movie with even monster vision. This all lead up to an ending on the surface that was anti-climactic and pretty much on the lame side.

I can’t say that I didn’t like this movie at all. I liked some of it. Sadly it slipped into the mediocre towards the last half of the film and for that my good Bums, this movie fell into the ho-hum 2 ½ can zone.

Added:  Tuesday, September 04, 2007
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