Shapeshifter

Alex (Paul Nolan) belongs to a family of parents being ex-spies for the CIA. However, a nasty evil leader of an East European country with solicited help from a witch (Catherine Blythe) decides to capture them and squeeze out some info. Naturally, it is up to their son to rescue them. Only this is a big kid older than most teenyboppers are.

While he is searching for his parents, he stays in a hostel. There is a coming-of-age cutie (Emmanuelle Vaugier) and an old dude that found a magical, digital rock as a kid assist him. Alex soon conveniently learns he can shapeshift.

Can his shifty shapes and his cutie friend help him extricate his parents?

What is the shifty witch really up to?

Will he keep his new pet rock and/or the cutie?

I know this is a pilot for a kid's series (probably to replace Alex Mac) but how dumb do you think kids are? Do not answer that. Believe me, kids would barf if you tried to feed them this pseudoscience, quasi-mystical (explicatory deleted.)

Aside from this the acting, what acting? Well, where there should have been acting, they use fake Romanian accents. The witch looks like the cousin to the woman who narrates "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

The props are just junk leftover from "Lost in Space" (the TV series). The story has no cohesion. They must be banking on the viewer having attention deficit disorder. Once again, we have a story where the kid is much cleverer than his catatonic parents are.

I watched this movie on a night when I wanted something light in the sci-fi realm. It fit the bill. I thoroughly enjoyed it inconsistencies and weakness included. I found the use and place of music intriguing but I can't say more without going too far.

After a dramatic kidnapping, precocious teen, Alex Brown's (Paul Nolan) singular shapeshifting ability is startlingly revealed to him by charismatic, 360 yr old Romanian gypsy Janos (Teodor Danetti). This unprecedented physical talent for metamorphosis proves happily fortuitous, since Alex would have enormous trouble rescuing his missing spy parents without it! This bold, madly incongruous admixture of Spy Kids & Manimal, while aggressively ludicrous, is certainly not without some bizarro appeal to the more forgiving psychotronic B-Movie fans! If you can fully accept Shapeshifter's playful lack of credibility, one might then be able to more fully appreciate this gallopingly goofy spy/shapeshifting fantasy! Shot in picturesque Bucharest, the film is often visually appealing, diffusing the clunky dynamics of its rather tiresome Cold War plot. This kooky caper is remarkably well acted, and the gifted actors play it relatively straight, which ultimately works greatly to Shapeshifter's advantage. This fabulously freaky, far-flung Full Moon fantasy proved to be more righteous than I thought it would be, and the Pantomime-nasty Cyberwitch (Catherine Blythe) needs her very own Full Moon franchise!

Another so bad it's good film. The added chaos and absolute randomness makes for a pretty entertaining flick. The acting in this movie makes 'the room' look Oscar worthy and makes for some good laughs.

The mix of magic and technology was not handled nearly as well as I anticipated. The ability of the main character to shapeshift into any creature just by seeing a picture of it.

Later in the movie the title character was able to 'dissolve' into data and go fight a 'cyberwitch'. This ability was never completely explained as to how this is possible.

For pre-teens, these are probably minor points that many would not catch.