Movies in Disguise - Not your usual review of the movie "Shadow:Dead Riot"

Pirated DVDs in Laos are cheap. Excellent copies of movies could be bought at US$1.50 each from shops in the two Chinatowns (one for mainland Chinese and the other for Lao-Chinese). Not only do you get conventional movies like Memoirs of Geisha, you can find excellent collection of TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Simpsons, Angel, CSI as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean drama serials. You also can buy hard-to-find collections such as Remington Steel (if you are into Pierce Brosnan), Charlie Chaplain's movies as well as documentaries such as BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs. All in all, it is a movie-watcher's paradise if you don't mind waiting two months for a good, mastered copy to arrive from piratcy havens like China and Thailand.

The problem of buying DVDs in Laos is that you never know exactly what the movie is about simply by reading the cover and the printed reviews. There are afterall, a lot of movies (A and B grade) produced all around the world every month. B-grade American movies never made it to cinema screening but go straight to video stores. Take the DVD which I just bought over the weekend - "Shadow: Dead Riot".

Cover looks ok. The back of the cover said the following:

Horror Icon Tony Dodd (Clive Barker's Candyman series) delivers his most powerful and evil performance as Shadow, an executed and resurrected serial killer who haunts a women's prison in search of the girl known as Solitaire. Solitaire senses her impending doom and prepares to single-handedly take on Shadow and his army of zombies in a supernatural martial arts showdown . . ."

Sounds good huh? Check out the review printed behind.

" . . . gory, tongue-in-cheek thunder . . " Fantasia 2005. Hey, if someone gives a good review of the movie, it must be good right? (I would admit that I am a dumbass at times).

I thought at US$1.50, I could afford to give it a try since I am looking for a good (read:mindless) zombie slasher movie anyway. Woman kicking zombies ala Dawn of the Dead, hmmm, I could dig that.

Within 5 minutes of watching the movie, I had this strange feeling that this movie is well, unusual. The setup looks really cheap and Tony Todd (that black guy from Final Destination) looked ridiculous (and embarassed) in dreadlocks. Also every actor looked like a part time actor (you know what I mean - these part-time actors looked like they deliver pizzas and KFC in the evening and are probably family and friends of the director and cast). The movie was also cheap that when guns fired, they can't even afford to show the bullets. Just the audio sounds, Bang Bang! And as with all cheap movies with limited human resources, the prison guard who was killed by zombies in the first minute was alive and well after the battle, except wearing a cap so that audience would hopefully not recognise him as supposed to be dead. It was so funny, I almost died from laughter. But that is not all.

The first major sign that this movie was not just a horror flick was when I saw the chief female security officer at the women's prison. She is hot. Pornographic hot. You know the type - sexy, blonde, looked a bit dumb, tried her very best to act but couldn't read her lines correctly. When I saw Ms Andrea Langi appeared on the screen using a baton to beat up women inmates, I thought "Okaayyy, this is strange".

(This is a chief prison guard? Imprison me anytime)

And then, WHAM!, lesbian sex scene in the shower. Within the next hour, there are 4 softcore sex scenes (one straight and three lesbian) and lots of full frontal nudity. I lost count of the number of shower scenes although I assume women inmates bath a lot. A LOT. I know I am in trouble when a muscular female prisoner asked one skinny bimbo to "scrub her" (trust me, it is an "ouch" moment not a "oooh" moment). Ladies and Gentleman, I just bought a soft porn movie in disguise. Whoppee.

Man, on the surface, the movie looked like a soft porn movie gone way bad. Everyone looked like bumbling idiots who can't act and run around getting killed. And the actors are so cheap, they can't even act dead. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw this prison guard just say "urrgh" and fell over when swamped by zombies. Wow, what a thespian! Not. The whole prison setup looks like they rented a cheap bungalow somewhere in deserted Changi. I guess that wasn't much you could do with just a US$10,000 budget.

However, if you could get past the obvious flaws such as campy acting and bad sex scenes (nothing hardcore), I must laugh and give the director some credit. The director is actually quite smart and obviously know how to work within a tight budget. He divided the movie into two parts. Part 1 is all about the introduction of the female character (Solitaire) into prison and basically kicking other women inmates' asses which also includes taking lots of showers which equals lots of gratitous lesbian sex scenes. But just when viewers get sick of wet girls and bad lesbian sex scenes, BAM! Part 2 - Here comes the legion of zombies which magically appear out of the ground and proceed to attack all the naked women. How many of you can say you have watched half naked women prisoners fight zombies with nails, chairs and pipes? The creativity within a low budget production is amazing. Forget about Brokeback Mountain, this is cheap Brokeback Prison with zombies.

And the fighting scenes - holy shit. You would expect a cheap porn-horro flick to have poor fighting scenes like women scratching each other with their nails and weak punches and kicks. But it turns out that the director (Derek Wan) is Jet Li's action cinematographer! So you get lots of awesome kicks from the female actresses who tried their very best to perform, heads are kicked off (OMG, awesome) and hearts are ripped out. Solitaire ended up fighting with the demon with a zombie's arm as Nunchaku - Bruce Lee style. Is there no end to the director's hilarious creativity?

I don't know how to grade this movie since it transcends the normal movie universe. I wouldn't ask you to go watch it since it will never been shown in Singapore cinemas or would it be found in the video stores anyway. But one thing for sure, this movie is smarter than any B-grade movies the US has produced. The dedication of all the cheap actors and actresses is amazing. Sure, a spoon can act better than them but hey, people are going to watch this movie for the naughty naked ladies and the zombies who want to eat them anyway. If you forced me to grade this movie, hell, I would actually rate it higher than "Memoirs of a Geisha". At least the cheap naked actresses in Shadow kicked zombies' ass and don't pretend to be anything they are not.