Joanne Blaylock, best known as the reserved Vulcan T’pol from Star Trek:
Enterprise, awakens to find herself in a padded cell. Wearing only gray underwear,
she has no knowledge of how she got there, and when she begins to bang on the
door, she hears some terrifying noises outside--vicious growling, accompanied by thrashing
around by some unseen creature. When a brief brown-out strikes the facility, the
door to her cell becomes unlocked, and she’s able to wander around the deserted
complex. She encounters a man in another padded cell, played by James Marsters--better
known as Spike the vampire from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The man never realized
that the door to his cell had become unlocked.
As they share information--what little they have--we learn that not only are the
man nor woman unable to recall how they got there, but they have no memory of their lives
prior to waking up in their cells. They don’t even remember what their names are.
Walking around the vast complex, they find no clue as to the whereabouts of their
captors, but they do
encounter a locked cell door with two more people--another man and a woman--on
the other side of it. The other couple is also dressed only in gray underwear
and suffer from a memory loss. Unable to get past the locked door, the foursome
reluctantly split up to look for away out. But they run into a fearsome creature
that stalks the complex, a creature that looks like…the smoke monster from LOST?
Shadow Puppets starts out as a very edgy thriller that's reminiscent of the far
superior Cube. But unlike Cube, Shadow Puppets quickly loses steam. Director
Michael Winnick effectively manages to set up the unsettling premise of a group of
strangers waking up in a strange place with no knowledge
of who they are or how they got there. But once the creature that's stalking
them is finally revealed to be nothing more than a floating ink spot with anger
issues, things begin to unravel. And, unlike the
original Cube--which remained enigmatic to the bitter end--Shadow Puppets
eventually explains everything, and that’s where it really falls apart. Without
giving too much away, I can say that the explanation is very silly, and
oftentimes doesn't jive with things that were previously established.
The inkspot monster, which is done with bad CGI effects, looks very
cheesy, and the film overall devolves into one of those god-awful Saturday night
monster flicks that the Sci-Fi Channel shows on a regular basis (in fact, I wouldn’t be
too surprised if Shadow Puppets shows up on Sci-Fi soon). Also, the pacing starts to drag about
mid-way through the film, and I had to "help" the movie along in some spots with
fast-forwarding. The sturdy Blaylock and Marsters are quite good in their roles,
as is the ever dependable Tony Todd, who plays a prisoner. But other than the
fact that the hard-bodied female cast are in their underwear for the better part
of the film’s running time (Blaylock and the petite Diahnna Nicole Baxter are quite fetching), there’s not much to recommend about Shadow Puppets.
If you really want to see it, you might as well wait for it to pop up some
Saturday night on the Sci-Fi Channel.
--SF
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