Welcome to part 2 of my dollar store DVD deep dive. (Check here for a primer on what we’re doing and why.) Today’s question: when is a mockbuster not a mockbuster?
Imitation and deception: time-honored traditions in the dollar store movie space. For the prior entry in this series, I wrote about a time loop film that, while not made to capitalize on Happy Death Day, was clearly packaged with the hope that inattentive consumers would pick it up by mistake. Of course, the art of the mockbuster has two cardinal rules: (1) make sure the movie you’re ripping off is well-known, and (2) make it obvious. Mockbuster fortune does not favor the meek.
Why, then, would you make a movie aping a Japanese zombie film from two decades ago that only die-hards remember, then market it with no reference to its most salient feature? Today, I’m tackling a film that makes both of those baffling choices: Shadowland, Simon Kay’s hitherto lone contribution to cinema.
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In a flashback prologue, we meet a young man named Kane, who offers a woman named Sandy a ride in his car. It turns out they are going to the same place: a hidden military installation in the deep forest. We’re then introduced to Cam, the leader of a security detail tasked with protecting an American ambassador in Scotland. On the way to a function, they are ambushed and a gunfight breaks out. Cam, his team, and the ambassador’s family flee into the woods and take shelter in an abandoned building, while their attackers are killed by something in the woods.
The lone survivor shows up at the building and is revealed to be Cam’s former associate Elaine (The Haunting of Bly Manor’s Amelia Eve). They also meet an eccentric old man who turns out to be Kane from the prologue. The facility is the military barracks, dilapidated after years of disuse. The group, Kane reveals, is being hunted by a creature created by the military. When the base was abandoned, Kane stayed behind as its steward. We never learn the monster’s true nature, only that it has the power to zombify the dead.
Horror geeks over a certain age might hear a faint ringing bell. Two groups of gun-toting ne’er-do-wells collide in a forest where the dead return to life, with a seemingly unrelated prologue and inscrutable lore–it’s the plot of Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus (2000), a film that made a splash at the time but has been largely forgotten since.
But where Versus juggles all those elements with grace and gallows humor, Shadowland wants you to know how serious it is, from its deadpan dialogue and somber tone to its dark photography–seriously, this is J.T. Petty levels of “might be scary if only I could see.” And why they left the “resurrection forest” angle out of the marketing materials, neutering any interest it might have generated among Versus fans, is anybody’s guess.
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By the way, if you’ve ever wondered how hard it is to distinguish between the names Kane, Ken, and Cam when spoken with thick Scottish accents and recorded on pro-am audio gear, the answer is: almost impossible.
Misleading box art? Not really, though it kinda oversells the size of Amelia Eve’s role.
Decision: Dollar Store Dud