Night Shadow starts in Los Angeles were hot shot TV news-reporter Alexander Jung (Brenda Vance) finishes for the day & begins her vacation, she intends to drive to a small town called Danford where she grew up & still has family & friends there. While driving there Alex notices a strange shabby looking man on the side of the road just outside the town, once there proper Alex meets up with her brother Tia (Stuart Quan) & old acquaintance's including the local Sheriff named Adam (Tom Boylan) who suddenly becomes a very busy man as a series of gruesome murders take place. The county coroner quickly realises that the horrible mutilation suffered by the victims is the work of a large fanged animal of some description, Alex covers the story for her news station while the Sheriff has to track down a vicious killer...
Directed by Randolph Cohlan I thought Night Shadow was not particularly great in any capacity. The script starts off reasonably well, the basic story & premise is quickly set up in a decent enough fashion but then it goes absolutely nowhere until a predictable & throughly standard 'the Sheriff & reporter saves the day' type climax. Night Shadow is supposedly a Werewolf film, however the word Werewolf is never mentioned & it's involvement in the plot is negligible. For all it matters it could have been just about any other sort of cinematic creature/alien/monster/zombie. There is no attempt to utilise any of the traditional Werewolf ideas & themes found in films, the full moon has nothing to do with it's transformations & is never mentioned, there are no silver bullets & there is absolutely no background to the Werewolf or it's human alter-ego whatsoever, he isn't given a single word of dialogue throughout the entire film. How did he become a Werewolf? Whats his plan? Why, in the first half of the film, does he seem to follow Alex around & intimidate her yet by the end of the film he stops & this plot angle comes to nothing? When Tia tries to unblock a sink blood seems to pump from the plug hole, why? It's never explained, also didn't Tia think blood pouring from a sink was a little bit odd? I mean there had been at least a couple of murders in the area so didn't he think it might be relevant to tell the police? There is one scene where a newspaper headline is clearly visible which talks about animal attacks but is never expanded upon, why? What's the point of laying this narrative down & then doing absolutely nothing with it? It just wastes everyones time including mine because I have to sit through it for no good reason! Add to that the middle of Night Shadow is extremely slow & it all makes for a less than impressive 90 odd minutes.
Director Cohlan makes a competent but unspectacular film, there's no real style or visual flair to it. Think cheap made-for-TV film & your there. There's little in the way of scares or horror, things just abruptly happen with no build up at all which means there's no atmosphere or tension. There are a couple of OK action scenes but their OK in a low budget sort of way. There's not much in the way of gore either, there's a trunk full of body parts, there's a bit where someone eats the flesh from a maggot covered severed hand & an almost cool scene where someone has a long pipe stuck through their back & it emerges through their stomach in a decent special effect. The Werewolf effects towards the end of the film are less than impressive, the thing looks like it's wrapped in a shaggy carpet rather than have a coat of fur.
Technically the film is fine but utterly forgettable, totally flat & really bland, I think I'd have completely forgotten it by the end of the week. The acting is OK but I doubt many of the actors here got much work because of their performance's in Night Shadow.
Night Shadow is an average 80's horror film, to be fair to it it isn't the worst film I've ever seen but it just feels so generic, flat, unoriginal, patched together without much thought & lacking ambition. I can't really say I'd be ale to recommend it to anyone, overall I'd say this is probably one best avoided.
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