Watch Shadow: Dead Riot For Free

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

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.

This movie is the definition of not judging a movie by its cover. The cover makes it look alright but the movie itself is crap. The movie would be okay if the director actually put some effort into this 81 minute movie. Me and my friends watched this tonight and we laughed so hard at a movie thats supposed to scare us. The plot is crap, the animations are disgusting and look like cut scenes from an old play station 1 game, the baby in the movie is literally a dummy you can buy in a supermarket for like 5 bucks and when it attacks people they seriously hold him and tilt him so it looks like he is attacking them, the fight scenes are way over done and the special effects are something you can do on windows movie maker and the ending is a failed cliff hanger leading to a non existent sequel and the music can be downloaded free off google. Overall this movie is not worth your 10 bucks. The directors were just taking a dump all over zombie movies and the cover has reviews on it right? yeah, they even misspelled "decade" on one of the reviews. If you want a good laugh at a crappy movie, go and watch it. Just don't buy it.

Oddball mixture of women-in-prison, zombie, and kung-fu genre elements has Tony Todd starring as an executed psychopath who murdered and raped women before his death by lethal injection. Todd's name is Shadow and his blood is powerful due to a successful ritual which equipped him with superhuman capabilities. When a riot breaks out after Shadow's body explodes(!), during the process of his execution, the prisoners are gunned down by a prison warden's guards. They are buried in a pit on the grounds of the prison along with Shadow's remains, to be forgotten.20 years later, the prison is a women's reformatory, built as a sort of rehabilitation center for female criminals to help them recover from their past mistakes which brought them to their current situation. A new prisoner is entering the institution, her name Solitaire(Clare Green), a tough young woman with amazing martial arts fighting skills..which she'll need in order to combat a nasty, muscular felon named Mondo who commands an authoritative, intimidating presence among the other inmates, afraid of her because she's stronger and bigger than they are. The prison's doctor has a vial of Shadow's blood and begins injecting Solitaire with it, hoping the powerful properties will prove that it is a source of eternal life. Meanwhile, Shadow's remains will be resurrected when an inmate(Misti Mundae, AKA, Erin Brown), attempting to escape, snaps her ankle, bleeding into the ground which represents his burial place. Not only will Shadow rise from the earth, but so will the dead inmates buried along with him. Shadow will confront and attempt to destroy Solitaire, the one he sought after when he killed her mother many years ago. Director Derek Wan is mostly concerned with showing bodies hurled in the air and up against walls with brute force. Solitaire has the uncanny ability to withstand brutal punishment which would paralyze most people, but the excuse for this is Shadow's blood which courses through her veins. Included are the sleazy head of security, Elsa Thorne(Andrea Langi), a lesbian who offers certain inmates privileges as long as they service her sexual needs, and the usual naked showers. Tatianna Butler is Mondo, one of the major antagonists which Solitaire must contend with, although our heroine gets the best of her every time. Michael Quinlan is the other antagonist, Dr. Swann, who actually injects the newborn baby of an inmate, Emily(Cat Miller), with Shadow's blood turning the infant into a bloodthirsty monster reminiscent to the creature in IT'S ALIVE. Swann wants to test Shadow's blood on others before using it on himself. He also supplies a junkie inmate with pills in exchange for sexual favors. But Todd and Greene own this movie as villain and heroine respectively. They have not one but two showdowns and there's plenty of wire-fu where poor Greene gets tossed around, not without getting her licks in. Misty Mundae has a minor role as one of those abused inmates who Mondo mistreats..and, yes, she does get naked on occasion, but leaves the film far too soon. Nina Hodoruk is the warden who desperately wants to rehabilitate and help her prisoners, deeply worried about the occurrences which threaten her institution. You get plenty of zombie carnage at the end, when the female prisoners must ward off(mostly unsuccessfully)the undead awakened by Shadow's blood. Todd makes his appearance in the beginning and end of the film, showing up in flashback when past incidents pop up in Solitaire's mind after she touches a ritualistic symbol carved in the floor of a solitary prison cell she's confined to for fighting with Mondo. Most of the effects are small scale which is probably why Wan edits violent scenes with the gore fast as to not dwell too long on them. The ending involving a special knife and the mark on Shadow's hand makes no sense at all.

Or even D-movie? I like me a really low-to-no budget movie from time to time. Because they don't take themselves serious. This is the case here too, but still I couldn't enjoy the movie. Yes I knew the budget was tight and that there would not be so much money at hand, but seeing they could hire a martial Arts expert, for the fight scenes, makes you wonder why they didn't also spend money on a funnier script (w/o every cliché in the book)! Although the tone of the movie is not to be serious, the main actress does take her job a bit too seriously, which contradicts the whole thing and feels stupid. So while there is one or two original things here, the overall feeling, for me was "boring"!