Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Dead Shadows Blu-ray Movie Review

La nuit de la comète.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 29, 2014

Despite what your filmgoing experience may have led you to believe, cliché ridden horror films are not under the exclusive purview of the American movie industry. Case in point: Dead Shadows, a fitfully effective but awfully derivative film that posits a host of nefarious happenings when a comet passes near the earth. The film begins promisingly enough, with a flashback to an appearance by Halley’s Comet some ten years or so in the past. Writer Vincent Julé and director David Cholewa let us know almost instantly that there are scary doin’s with various comets afoot, or at least in space, with a kind of cool looking special effect that resembles one of the DTS-HD Master Audio logo announcements that regularly plague Blu-ray releases. A kind of watery crinkle in outer space “gives birth” to a gigantic comet which seems to be lit from within—is it actually a spaceship? When the comet hits the earth’s atmosphere, it begins giving off huge clouds of dust, and a shot shows little specks of something floating down on a normal seeming suburban home. This appearance of Halley’s Comet coincidentally or not so coincidentally aligns with a horrifying murder-suicide of a couple in that home, killings which took place right in front of their already emotionally fragile son. The film then segues into the “present” time to introduce us to that boy as a young man. Chris (Fabian Wolfrom) doesn’t seem especially traumatized by the now long ago event, though he keeps himself holed up in his kind of dilapidated apartment, fielding customer service calls from tech challenged customers while he simultaneously plays video games. His only contact with the outside world seems to be when he spies through his apartment door’s peephole, catching a glimpse of a pretty young neighbor named Claire (Blandine Marmigere), whose fights with her boyfriend occasionally expand out into a shared hallway. Of course Chris and Claire finally “meet cute” later that same day when Chris wanders into Claire’s unlocked apartment, and that at least sets up the “you and me against the world” trope that so many horror films tend to wallow in. With the entire planet seeming to be in “party hearty” mode with the appearance of a new comet, one which will be especially visible to nighttime Parisians, Chris may subliminally be on edge, though the film doesn’t really exploit his past history with regard to rocky visitors from outer space.

In a viewing juxtaposition which probably only helped to sour me on both films, Dead Shadows and Devil's Due each feature a raucous, strobe lit party scene where the participants—and by inference, the viewer—starts to undergo a change in perception which may be “reality”, alcohol or a surreptitious drug having been administered. Devil’s Due makes the whole thing ridiculous by having the scene (along with the rest of the film) be so-called “found footage”, so at least there’s something to be thankful for in this very similar sequence in Dead Shadows. Is Chris starting to hallucinate as various people seem to morph? It’s a question that is reduced to its most literal level as the film trundles on, but rather interestingly one of Dead Shadows’ most artful moments of unease—if not outright horror—occurs before any binge drinking and even before various transformations start to show up in the comet’s wake. Much earlier in the film, Chris has a really odd nonverbal interchange with a completely peculiar looking woman hunched over in a Parisian garden. If writer Vincent Julé and director David Cholewa had concentrated more on that kind of mood building and less on the more overt horror elements, Dead Shadows might have had a bit more punch.

Of course it turns out that people are morphing, and in rather gruesome ways, and Chris and Claire soon find themselves in a sort of quasi-zombie scenario when whatever is afflicting folks reaches out and grabs someone new. Dead Shadows stumbles, though, ironically much like its main character bumping and banging into things in the doom laden, monster filled night. There’s enough early information given to make Chris at least a passingly interesting protagonist, but then the film largely wastes this set up as the character merely has to fight off marauding hordes of—whatever they are. And here, too, Dead Shadows is almost an embarrassment of B-movie clichés. We have the bug like aliens, the zombie like humans and some sort of viral gooey thing that starts erupting on various characters’ faces and bodies as a precursor to their eventual transformation. Unfortunately, while the film of course posits the comet as the cause, even that conceit is never really fully developed, leaving the viewer wondering what all the fuss (and goo) is really about.

Despite looking a bit like John Stamos’ blonde Gallic cousin, Wolfrom does what he can with Chris, showing the kid’s isolationist tendencies while also depicting the character’s need to connect on some deeper level—at least with Claire. And Wolfrom is able to handle the action elements later in the film with a fair degree of aplomb. Unfortunately he saddled with both poor dialogue and a pretty cheesy looking facial appliance by the time the film wends towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

Dead Shadows Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dead Shadows is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. This appears to be a digitally shot feature, and it suffers from both benefits and anomalies that are often endemic to native HD presentations. In the brightly lit sequences, colors are nicely saturated and accurate looking, and fine detail is commendable, especially in the many extreme close-ups (see screenshot 1 for a good example). However, starting with nightfall, the film suffers from rather poor contrast, with a really murky, inchoate image that lacks much in the way of shadow detail and in fact in some key instances any detail at all. Some of this may have been an intentional choice to help mask the sometimes less than spectacular looking special effects. While some of the practical effects actually look okay in this presentation, the CGI is very soft and inauthentic looking. Minimal noise creeps into some of the darker scenes.

Dead Shadows Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dead Shadows has paired DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and 2.0 mixes available in the original French as well as an okay but lesser English dub. There's some good, consistent surround activity here, including expected scenes like the throbbing, pulsating music in the party scene and, later, more nuanced ambient environmental effects as Chris starts to make his way through the dangerous and seemingly deserted city. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and there are no issues of any concern.

Dead Shadows Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Director David Cholewa (1080p; 33:37) is evidently from German television, as it posits textual questions in German, with Cholewa answering in French, all with subtitles.


• Making of Special Effects (1080p; 3:43) shows some of the green screen and other SFX being created and composited.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 00:49)


• Unfinished VFX Scene (1080p; 00:32)


• Trailer (1080p; 2:07)


• Teaser Trailer (1080p; 1:09)

Dead Shadows Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

You've seen large swaths of Dead Shadows before, albeit in properties as varied as Night of the Living Dead and Night of the Comet. But this film never develops its ideas fully enough, and in fact my hunch is most viewers are going to have several salient questions once the film ends—if they still care that much, that is. Dead Shadows actually begins with a relative flourish and has some nicely creepy moments, but then it all kind of devolves into a steaming pile of latex and CGI. There are a few chills here that genre enthusiasts may get a kick out of, but Dead Shadows is largely DOA.