Dead Shadows

The usual nonsense indie, this time hailing from France and flirting with Lovecraftian themes although never really going full whack with the whole Cthulhu vibe. This one involves a typical young uninteresting bloke whose parents died at the same time a comet came close to Earth. This year the comet's back, and various people are being transformed into zombie-liked tentacled nasties. That descriptions sounds far more interesting than the film actually is, because this is a typically pitiful experience in filmmaking, with lots of languid conversations to pad out the running time rather than adding anything meaningful.

The bizarre "Dead Shadows" is a terrible film with a messy screenplay and awful protagonist. There is no backstory or character development explaining the weird situation. The viewer learns that a family is destroyed in the disconnected beginning of the movie without any further explanation. Eleven years later there is a comet passing close to or maybe crashing on Paris. People is celebrating the end of the world, but out of the blue, they turn into grotesque creatures. The lead actor is a strange guy that seems to have the power of attracting easy and shallow women including his gorgeous next door neighbor. The violence is free and the CGI is very poor, recalling a Sci-Fi production. The unexpected conclusion is awful and completes with golden key this forgettable mess. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Sombras da Morte" ("Dead Shadows")

I literally had watched this movie in 2013-2014, when I was a children, it's really amazing return back in this media, because I didn't remembered many things at today, and return back watch this, it's similar watch for the first time, a good experience.

The fact that have Aliens on this movie in the France, and it's has a good CGI for 2012 actually, I didn't remembered that this movie is such good, I remember that I was gone to the video store with my dad and we get this movie in DVD Blue-ray and watched in home. I literally was a children, it's creepy return after 10 years. Trust me, it's a good experience. You will not waste your time with this.

Over the past couple of years we've come to expect mainly gory survival horror from France - and while I do love some of them (Haute Tension, Vertige etc) some have just been horrible (Martyrs) so I was pleasantly surprised when Dead Shadows turned out to be something very different.

Dead Shadows takes a lot of inspiration from 80s horror movies and has a Lovecraftian vibe to it. Horror movies these days tend to have a lot of pacing issues but I didn't find myself bored at any point during the movie. If you're looking for something entertaining that's not the standard gore-fest but still has lots of aliens, tentacles and action in it, I strongly recommend you check this out.

Screened at Dead By Dawn Festival.

Regarding an alien invasion of France, this film is utterly dire. It has a wimpish protagonist who every chick in the film seems to have the hots for and every female character in it is either shallow, vapid or both. It gives no real explanation or backstory, but simply belts along, yet manages to be utterly devoid of tension or suspense and has stupid plot holes. Even at 70 odd minutes it still feels too long and is basically a sequence of weird occurrences and mediocre fight scenes. Also, the CGI sucks.

I don't even really have the heart to go into any more detail except to say that it's a total turkey and didn't go down well at all with the audience at the Edinburgh Dead by Dawn festival where I caught it.

2/10, a boring annoying film that doesn't seem to have a clue about what it actually wishes to say and a film to be avoided. Truly dreadful.