By Ben Bussey
It can’t be a good sign when, halfway through watching a newly released French horror movie, you find yourself pondering what happened to the days when so much of the most exciting horror around was coming out of France. Really though, where did it all go wrong? French filmmakers were responsible for so many of the most intense, visceral, attention-grabbing genre entries of the early 21st century; movies like Haute Tension, Ils, Inside, and (even though I’m among the few that consider this last one ridiculously overrated) Martyrs. But at some point in the last five years or so, Gallic horror seemed to lose its sting, the next wave of filmmakers sidestepping the unrelenting harshness of Aja, Laugier and co in favour of more fantastical concepts, yet attempting to retain that same intensity. Yet while the likes of The Horde, Mutants and Goal of the Dead proved a bit mediocre and forgettable, this much I can say without hesitation: they look like indisputable masterworks next to Dead Shadows.
It really, truly makes me sad to say this, as Dead Shadows is a movie which at one point I’d held high hopes for, even if this was primarily down to the striking poster art which we first saw way back in 2011 (artwork which has been recreated with reasonable accuracy for this new DVD release). Of course, any time a film sits on the shelf for such a long period of time, the seeds of doubt are inevitably sown, particularly when festival screenings don’t garner much of a buzz either. So I’m sad but not especially surprised that, now Dead Shadows has finally limped out onto UK DVD and VOD, it proves to be a feeble sci-fi horror with neither the budget nor the know-how to do justice to a potentially great monster movie premise. Evocative of any number of genre greats, all it really succeeds in doing is making you wish you were watching those instead.
It all starts off promisingly enough, opening shots of an initially peaceful outer space showing something earthbound (The Thing/Predator homage: check), before we come down to earth to see a husband and wife row, overheard by a young son, turn fatal. Fast forward a bit and the young lad has grown up to be Fabian Wolfrom’s nerdy, neurotic twentysomething, working from home as a technical support, surrounded by movie posters and film geek paraphernalia and pumped full of anti-depressants. Of course, this being a movie aimed at similarly socially-dysfunctional nerds, our young hero inevitably has a fantasy female living in the flat opposite, who, following a very vocal bust-up with her last boyfriend, quite happily welcomes this perfect stranger in, not finding it the least bit inappropriate that he opted to walk right into her flat uninvited when he happened to notice the door was ajar. As it happens there’s a comet passing over that evening, and soon enough our readily available dreamgirl invites our socially awkward stud-in-sheep’s clothing to an apocalypse party, where yet more readily available women (many of whom are dancing just in their bras because girls do that at house parties, don’t they?) will behave suggestively toward him for no discernible reason. Anyway, the comet starts to effect people, some of them start turning into zombies, some start spouting tentacles, weedy loser must find his inner hero and fight back, but there may be more to him than meets the eye, yadayada… can I go watch Night of the Creeps and/or Night of the Comet instead?
It’s not just that Dead Shadows is a shallow, mean-spirited, passive-aggressive revenge of the nerds fantasy, painting pretty much every character other than the lead as either a sexually permissive, intellectually redundant bimbo or a belligerent predatory alpha male and inviting us to delight in their gradual obliteration. Plenty of perfectly entertaining movies have followed a similar ethos – but they pulled it off with a panache that Dead Shadows completely lacks. It’s flat as a pancake visually, both the practical and CGI FX are a let-down, the action sequences are poorly executed: it all smacks of a desperation to seem cool, dark and edgy, and falls short by a very wide margin. The end result just feels weak, and somewhat pretentious.
Once again – I really, honestly wish I had something nicer to say. I love a good creature feature, and would love to see more of them from the indie horror scene, but if they continue being on a par with this and the likes of Almost Human – once again, I’d sooner go grab my copy of Night of the Creeps again…
Dead Shadows is available now on DVD and VOD in the UK via Bulldog Film Distribution.