Shadow: Dead Riot (2006)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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.

Shadow: Dead Riot starts as multiple murderer & all round evil bloke Shadow (Tony Todd) is executed in prison, his supernatural blood leaks out & a full scale prison riot ensues which ends in a massacre. Jump forward 'Twenty Years Later' & the prison is now a rehabilitation center for women where loner Solitaire (Carla Greene) has just been sent, Solitaire is a hard lady & stands up to the prison bully Mondo (Tatianna Butler) & gains the respect of the lesser inmates. However Solitaire has strange visions about Shadow & after blood is spilt on a patch of grass in the grounds under which Shadow is buried he & the massacred inmates are revived & rise from the dead to eat the flesh of the living & only hard as nails Solitaire can stop Shadow & his dead rioting zombie friends...Photographed & directed by Derek Wan this is a pretty crappy low budget mess of an exploitation film that is saved by a fast pace & a bit of cheap gore but as a film make no mistake Shadow: Dead Riot is rubbish. The script tries to have it's cake & eat it, it tries to be the ultimate exploitation flick as it is an odd mixture of horror, comedy, kung-fu, blaxploitation, women in prison & zombie gore film all in one but the various genres don't come together that well & Shadow: Dead Riot isn't nearly as much fun as it should have been. There's no thought behind the story at all, there's never any reason given as to why Shadow comes back from the dead or why a bunch of zombies do either, there's some random nonsense about his blood & it feels like the makers of Shadow: Dead Riot made it up as they went along & to be honest they probably did. Every part of Shadow: Dead Riot is stolen from somewhere else, everything is predictable & clichéd. The character's are awful, the dialogue is embarrassing & maybe the makers will argue that it's all intentional but do I really want to watch a bad film that know's it bad? Also what about that inmate that made a run for it & got sucked down into the ground? Didn't the warden or guards not find it strange that an inmate suddenly vanished? At 90 odd minutes I got pretty bored with it even though the final third is almost none stop zombie action which says a lot, the first two thirds are more concerned with cat-fights between the inmates, the inmates taking showers, a lesbian guard (named Elsa Thorne after the infamous Ilsa & the actress who played her Dyanne Thorne) & a male Doctor who takes advantage of the female inmates. It's all pretty predictable although I suppose there's a lot going on & your never far from a naked woman or some cheap gore which might be a recommendation to some on it's own. Shadow: Dead Riot sounds great but, well, it isn't.The special effects are poor, the one or two CGI computer effects are embarrassing while the prosthetics & on set make-up effects look tatty with the worst mutant baby you can imagine. There's a fair amount of gore here, eyeballs hang out, there's plenty of zombies, bitten off nipples, mutant babies, bitten throats, severed limbs, blood spurts, ripped out guts, exploding heads & some really badly choreographed fights. The entire film takes place in just one location to keep the budget down even further. Neither funny nor scary Shadow: Dead Riot pays homage to better films such as Zombi 2 (1979), Burial Ground (1981) & any women in prison film like Chained Heat (1983) even though the women here are not what I would call attractive to be honest & the nude shower scenes aren't as much fun as they should be...With a supposed budget of about $750,000 it looks every bit as low budget as it was, the production values are poor & the whole thing looks cheap. Filmed in an old disused prison in Holmesburg in Pennsylvania. The acting is bad, Tony Todd is here for the money & looks stupid in thick rimmed glasses & wearing a wig of dreadlocks while everyone else is terrible.Shadow: Dead Riot is a film that wants to be fun but isn't, it's bad on every level but at least it keeps going & there's lots of blood & breasts even if the effects are poor & the women are unattractive. There are better films out there for sure.

If you're looking for a halfway decent women-in-prison film, look elsewhere. This one isn't campy-fun, it's campy-boring. What really irritates me is that some of the casting is excellent, with Margaret Baker just right as a predatory lesbian guard looking to enjoy the bodies of pretty female inmates like Misty Mundae and Ruby Larocca. But aside from some brief conversation, nothing remotely kinky or erotic ever happens! It's a waste of perfectly good female talent! And if you're not going to have at least one good girl/girl moment then WHY bother with a women-in-prison setting in the first place? The silly zombie plot would have been far more palatable had more attention been paid to the pretty girls-with-other-girls behind bars!

This movie incorporated at least 3 genres:women's prison,oriental action, and ghoulish horror. In that respect, it was an adventurous 90 minutes! While Tony was his usual imposing self, the guy playing Dr. Swann struck some realistic chords. He let his motivation for power and sex come through slowly and built up to the final climax.Given the ambitious nature of the film, the cast did the best job they could with minimal dialogue and tough action sequences. Speaking of the action, it was done in a way familiar to those who know Asian action films -- fast, violent, and well interspersed throughout the film. Carla Green looked great in a demanding physical role and I'd love to see more of her! As in many of these kinds of movies, maybe they tried to please too many people, but I'd love to see a sequel