Customer Reviews

Shapeshifter

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the second film ( Dead Men Walking) set in a prison by TheAsylum.
The mythos behind plot is very good, Russian mafia has this demon do there dirty work and the rainbow array of inmates have to defend their bars & mortar.
Jennifer Lee(see interview) Wiggins stars as a prison guard who has a inmate ,who maybe a DEMON.
The monster suit is awesome and frightening, and a different look that almost smacks of a Toy Franchise, Hey if Full Moon and Todd McFarlane can make action figures for any character..Why not The Beast from Bray Road Wolfette,Shapeshifter with medallion accessory,or the Rhett Giles everyman hero with removable appendages.

This thing starts out with an MTV-style rap video, with a creature killing a guy while blood gushes all over the prostitute he was with. The whole thing is done as a montage, which really gets the movie off to a stinky start. This "shapeshifter" guy can turn into a typical B-movie creature, and he's put in jail by some unsuspecting police officers. We get some backstory on the prison guards, one of them used to be in the military and got a less than honorable discharge (with that much backstory, you just know she's going to live until the end). We meet the rest of the inmates, stereotypical cliches doing their trash-talking thing. Yawn. For some reason, I didn't turn it off at this point, and I'm rather glad I didn't.

Once the shapeshifter guy does his thing, the blood starts flowing and the inmates and the remaining guard manage to get into the abandoned upper floors of the jail, where the monster stalks them for the rest of the film. The most impressive thing about this movie is the female lead, she does a pretty good job as the action hero, and looks really good doing it. The rest of the characters provide some additional story, as the creature is actually after one of them, and he wants to cover this fact up as best he can. Other than that they're mostly just there to serve as dinner. There's tons of gore, the monster has a real taste for intestines and we're treated to scene after scene of him eating them.

Overall, a fairly average low budget creature feature. Pretty good location inside the run down jail, good female lead. I give it a full point off for the first half hour of the movie, which was pretty bad.

Shapeshifter (Gregory Lemkin, 2005)

I'm instituting a new rule for horror movies: when one of your monster's default sounds comes from the original Doom, the movie is guaranteed to be awful. So it is with Shapeshifter, which started out with all the promise in the world, the died a quick and horrible death.

Plot: a nasty Romanian beast gets himself incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. Once he gets monstrous, the new guard, Ginny (Jennifer Lee Wiggins), is trapped in the prison with a number of inmates, and they have to find a way out before they get killed. Well, before some of them get killed.

The first thirty minutes-- before the beast shows up-- had potential. Sure, the acting is bad and the direction is barely competent, but the script at least made an attempt to be funny, and it pulled it off on occasion. Then the beast shows up, making the sounds of the zombies who sight you in Doom, and the hilarity pretty quickly became unintentional. Also, in prison movies, you expect the infighting and shifting allegiances among the inmates. You get enough of that here that it's obvious it was in the back of screenwriter A. Everett Howe's mind, but he never really gets around to exploring it, and the rivalries between the inmates never get to a dangerous level. (There's also some interesting background stuff about Ginny, but it's never exploited; the big revelation scene simply fizzles.)

About the only reason to spend eighty minutes with this debacle is because Jennifer Lee Wiggins is (a) the lead and (b) drop-dead gorgeous. There are times when that's enough, but a satisfying movie in any other way this is not. *

I'm only giving it one star, so people don't think I believe that this movie is actually good. It's just really bad good in a "I can't believe a bunch of people got together and spent time making this" sort of way. Cheesy creature, lame actors, non-sensical plot, this movie has all the criteria for a B-movie. The lead girl is pretty sassy, and the main black guy is hilarious (again in a bad way). I rented this, and had to bring my friends in to watch it because I couldn't believe my eyes.