Dead Shadows

Indie horror films haven’t changed much in the past few decades. They’re still the most profitable cost vs. risk genre out there for aspiring producers and directors to make a quick buck. Look no further than the French / German co-production Dead Shadows, which made it into a few film festivals and now premieres on hi-def courtesy of Scream Factory. Director David Cholewa wears his influences on his sleeves – or in this case the posters plastered to his main character’s walls.

Lifting an almost random collection of elements from John Carpenter’s The Thing and 1980’s Night of the Comet, the film introduces a few interesting characters, sets up a mysterious back-story, then proceeds to ditch all of it in favor of showcasing its shot-on-budget visual effects…which are admittedly impressive. But that doesn’t excuse Dead Shadows rather obvious agenda as a calling card film rather than delivering a cohesive story from beginning to end.

Chris (Fabian Wolfram, who looks like a James Franco-phile) is a horror-film junkie whose tech support home office is crowded with scary movie paraphernalia. He also suffers from a number of anti-social psychological issues, including an aversion to darkness, making him ancy whenever he’s away from his fluorescent cubbyhole. But his crush on a next-door neighbor (Bladine Marmigere) convinces him to attend an Apocalypse Party in the building next door.

You see, there’s some sort of rouge comet due to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere with predictions of widespread electrical interference. But it winds up doing much more than that. It awakens some latent alien monstrosities who, when they aren’t in their own multi-tentacled forms, take over human bodies and force them to do terrible things.

It’s all nonsensical bullshit. And Cholewa handles the horror angle quite poorly; especially the party scene where everything begins to hit the fan. It’s a shame, considering he’d built up a decent dramatic base in the first 20 minutes or so (the total running time is a brief 76 minutes with long credits). But as the digital creatures begin to crawl from their hidey-holes - with one very well rendered topless spider woman being the standout – the film reveals its true purpose as a VFX demo reel.

The whole thing feels not unlike the “let’s show ‘em what we can do” aesthetic behind 2010’s Skyline, another alien invasion computer graphics attention grabber. At the end of the day, the folks behind Dead Shadows may go on to do some amazing work, but paying customers deserve more than resume.

Scream Factory’s blu-ray shows off just how good a 15-day shoot can look nowdays. The image is as slick and colorful as digital photography can be with a Making Of, deleted scenes, interview and trailers included as extras.