When reviewing movies, I try to review them within the directors experience, budget, etc. as it is not fair to compare an indy movie with a $500 budget to a Hollywood movie with a $150,000,000 budget. If I match the contents and quality and factor the cost, most Hollywood movies would have a suck rating. If an indy film maker could make a film with the same quality level as Hollywood for under $10,000 then that is one hell of a person. You see, in most indy films the director has to do a lot of work. I made several movies and did most of the camera work, acted, directed, created all the props, created all the special effects, did all the lighting, wrote the script, did the casting, prepared all the food and drinks, did all the editing, did all the audio, did all the scoring and music creation, and more. To bash me or other indy film makers is just plain stupid and to compare or rate us against Hollywood is just ignorant. I have a feature film in distribution right now and made it for under $1,000, it's an OK movie, nothing great, but if I had $10-100 Million, yeah I would have had Paid professional actors, high quality cameras, crews and would have done nothing but edit. So in regards to Shadow People, is it the greatest movie, no, but it is a good movie within the context. I think it is great that the director was able to write the script and complete the project and he did it without any significant budget.
In the realm of ultra low budget indy films, I give this one a 7, perhaps higher. The movie was entertaining and I watched the whole thing without leaving, which compared to some recent Hollywood movies is a definite plus and I will refer specifically to RIPD (what a suck of a movie), Sharknado, and more stinkers out of Hollywood.
This is a decent movie for a person starting off in the movie industry and demonstrates what they can do with a little. If he had more money, I am sure this would have been a good movie that would have done well at the box office.
One way I look at movies for rating is to figure out the cost per viewer = Total Number of Times Movie was watched / Total Cost To Make the Movie. So if a movie cost $10M and was watched 10M times the cost would be $1 per time watched; if a movie cost $1,000 and was watched 2,000 times the cost is $.5 per time watched. That is how you can compare low budget indy to high budget Hollywood. You really can't compare the box office take, because there is too big of a gap on Advertising, so you simply can not compare. In fact, you really can't compare them, so don't. When you review a movie, be smart about it.
