Shadow: Dead Riot

The Women in Prison genre was once saturated by the sleazy films of the likes of Jess Franco and Joe D'Amato; but has all but died out since then and all we are left is the residue; which includes Shadow: Dead Riot. The film is something of a coming together of the aforementioned Women in Prison genre and the zombie genre; although by only giving fleeting glimpses of both, it fails to really nail down either one, and what we are left is a rather silly mess; although it is a sporadically entertaining mess. The film begins with execution of a prison inmate who goes by the name of Shadow. Shadow is apparently a mass murderer with voodoo powers (and just to give you an idea of the overall quality of the film; he's played by Tony Todd in a ridiculous wig!). Anyway, Shadow is killed and his death triggers some sort of curse on the prison. Years later; the prison has become a woman's prison and is welcoming a new arrival in the form of a chick called Solitaire. Solitaire apparently has some link with Shadow and her arrival triggers his second coming...

The film is obviously very low rent and anyone going into it is liable to know that; so it would be a bit pointless to say that the acting is atrociously wooden and ridiculous. My main reason for seeing this film was undoubtedly the presence of soft porn star Misty Mundae. She's bad in this film even by her own low acting standards; and her role is made even more disappointing by the fact that she's not in it for long. The only other name on the cast list likely to be recognised by horror fans belongs to the aforementioned Tony Todd...who picks up his pay cheque. The plot is always silly and ridiculous; but there are a couple of good ideas in there that keep things interesting. There are plenty of coincidences and plot holes too...so, as is often the case with films like this, it's best to turn your brain off before the film starts. The central plot involving the new prison inmates is actually one of the less interesting parts of the film, however, which brings it down. All in all, this is a decent way to kill ninety minutes and while film critics won't be impressed; if you like low budget trash, you might like this.

Derek Wan deserves a tip of the proverbial hat. Whilst other directors only managed to create dreck as bad as this only during the past few years, he succeeded in putting this steaming pile together almost a decade and a half ago - surely a visionary act!

It's got everything you'd expect of a 2019/2020 creation... A $2.50 crystal microphone used for the sound... Shot using a $200 digital camera with plastic lens... Special effects from the requisite great-aunt's make-up case... Script written by a stoner with a severe case of the "munchies..." And a cast made up of the "wanna-bes" who didn't even manage to catch the bus to get to a real talent agency.

It should come as no surprise that Misty Mundae was in this (in this case using her alternative stage name of Erin Brown) - not that she's incredibly bad (she was actually one of the better performers, which in itself says a lot), but because she always seems to be involved with "WTF were they thinking" movies.

I can imagine this would be a very watchable movie for 13-14 year old boys, owing to its incessant gratuitous nudity and very pathetic (even for a daytime soap opera) sex scenes - or maybe for a late-teen stoner - but anyone with even a slightly functional grey matter will be reaching for the remote within minutes of the start.

Steer clear if you value your time and sanity.

A serial killer/voodoo practitioner is executed in jail. But something happens and he explodes instead. His blood flows through prison and turns the inmates into zombies. The warden orders all shot and they bury them in the yard.

Years later the jail is now for females only. Some supposedly tough chick called Solitaire is incarcerated. She doesn't want to deal with anyone, but trouble finds her nonetheless. We meet the usual jail characters. The nice but clueless warden, her gorgeous enforcer, the baddest inmate of them all, her gang, and her servant (the lovely Erin Brown), a pregnant nice girl, the evil Dr who experiments on the girls by injecting them with someone's mysterious and powerful blood.

Things quickly turn violent between Solitaire and the bad muscular girl. But Solitaire also starts having visions about the voodoo guy. And whenever blood flows, the earth will suck it up, and people too end up disappearing. The pregnant girl gives birth to some monster baby. And voodoo guy is resurrected together with his army of zombies. That will lead to the eventual confrontation between Solitaire and voodoo guy.

Shadow: Dead Riot was somewhat of a revelation. Trailers of it looked quite awful, but it's a surprisingly good movie. It's not perfect or even good all around. In fact it's like two movies made by two different sets of people. One movies looks good, is well-acted, well-lit. The other looks cheap, is poorly acted, and boring.

When this movie is good, it's very good, it has a bit of the 70s look and feel to it and music by Vernon Reid. The action and fight scenes are outstanding, performances are good, the zombie aspect is also well done with lots of attention to detail, stunts are superb and there's some gore and a bit of nudity.

The problems though include the main character and the lead actress, poor acting by some actors, the cheap CGI effects, the lighting in some sets, the live sound with pronounced echo.

Usually movies that combine different genres altogether don't work at all. But Shadow does. It's a women-in-prison movie with lots of fights inspired by the precision of martial arts, with zombies, and the supernatural. All of these aspects work very well. And I'm more than willing to overlook the negative aspects, after all this isn't a A-level or even B-movie. It's a C+ movie that dared to be different. I wish there had been more emphasis on the women-in-prison theme, more nudity, more gore, more of Andrea Langi, Ruby Larocca and Erin Brown.

Shadow was produced by the same team that produced Flesh for the Beast, another excellent C level horror movie that I'm very fond of and that is overall more consistent than Shadow. Here they had to compromise a bit more but they also took more chances and tried to make an ambitious movie with few resources.

If you give Shadow a fair chance you won't be disappointed.

Or even D-movie? I like me a really low-to-no budget movie from time to time. Because they don't take themselves serious. This is the case here too, but still I couldn't enjoy the movie. Yes I knew the budget was tight and that there would not be so much money at hand, but seeing they could hire a martial Arts expert, for the fight scenes, makes you wonder why they didn't also spend money on a funnier script (w/o every cliché in the book)!

Although the tone of the movie is not to be serious, the main actress does take her job a bit too seriously, which contradicts the whole thing and feels stupid. So while there is one or two original things here, the overall feeling, for me was "boring"!

Bad ass phychopath, Shadow (Candyman's Tony Todd) is executed, but not before starting a full scale riot resulting in many prisoner deaths. Twenty years later the prison is now a womens' penitentiary. Focusing on the new inmate, Solitaire (Carla Greene), a tough girl who Shadow was planning to sacrifice when she was a baby, it isn't long before the zombies of the prisoners led by Shadow himself are out to finish what he started. This cheesy b-grade horror flick might have had a little promise in the beginning and I like Tony Todd, but once the film gets to the women's prison and focuses on it's inhabitants, the film becomes simply dreadfully lame, not even the shower scene or other nudity could save it from sub-par mediocrity. The film does pick up in the last 30 minutes or so, but not enough to make it watchable.

my grade: D

Eye Candy: Toy, and Aggie Valdez show tits; Misty Mundae gives full frontal; Danielle Riley shows EVERYthing; and various extras show much skin as well