Shadow: Dead Riot (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"Shadow comes on like the low-budget love child of Evil Dead and Reform School Girls, a crazy camp blitzkrieg of lockdown melodrama, kung fu catfights, black-magic corniness, exploding torsos, perverted doctors, impromptu zombie childbirth and bountiful lesbian shower scenes."

The New York Times

"... naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks"

TV Guide

If you read those reviews, you probably already realize that this is a peculiar movie. If you think about it a little bit, you'll realize there is also something odd about the distribution of this film. The New York Times doesn't review straight-to-vid movies. Shadow received a brief theatrical release. Given that it is a kung-fu zombie women-in-prison film, you have to find that an amazing accomplishment. Perhaps it is because it is the Citizen Kane of kung-fu zombie women-in-prison films. Just so you know that all of those diverse genres are sewn together seamlessly, I probably should tell you that the head zombie and the new girl in prison are both expert martial artists with preternatural abilities (lots of wirework), and they eventually fight each other. As it happens, the zombie is also a voodoo zombie who exploded when he died, and the new girl is his daughter. Oh, yeah, and he can talk with the living, although his army of the undead consists of the usual growling, shambling, mindless, brain-eating kinds of zombies. Oh, yeah, and the loopy prison doctor has been injecting her with her father's blood, which he saved from the post-explosion mess ...

... and there are about a million other such bizarre plot elements

Let's face it, the plot actually defies any kind of concise, conventional description. If you really want the rundown, the official site has a detailed summary.

The inspiration for the film was a 1991 Hong King actioner called The Story of Ricky, which one reviewer described as, "so gleefully over-the-top that it exists in its own ludicrous stratosphere and is one of the most memorable Hong Kong exploitation films ever made." You could make virtually the same comments about Shadow: Dead Riot, and add that it is also filled with plenty of gratuitous shower and sex scenes, thus elevating it to even greater exploitation heights than the original.

What can I say? I know it's exploitative junk that probably should have gone straight to video, and probably deserves its low scores at Metacritic and IMDb, but I found it fascinating and very competent in many ways. It is not only over-the-top with grotesque violence and ludicrous plotting, but it is also imaginative and atmospheric. I like the clammy and stylized prison location they chose, and I like the lighting effects used to make it seem surreal and otherworldly. I like the ever-charismatic Tony Todd (Candyman) as the voodoo zombie. I like the fact that it doesn't take itself seriously, and never hesitates to go to any silly extreme. The film has some rough edges, and the acting is not good at all, but in spite of that it's one of the more entertaining B movies I've seen in a long time.