Shadow (2009)

Ok, this movie is vexing. It starts out as a very tedious pursuit flick: a former soldier biking through rural Europe pisses off asshole locals in a bar by rescuing a woman they're harassing, so the locals chase him and the woman through the woods. Suddenly, the movie changes completely, as a creepy figure who for some reason has apparently built a huge Gothic torture complex in the middle of nowhere captures all of them and spends most of the rest of the movie silently torturing them horribly and graphically, with the kind of creative degeneracy you'd find in the worst torture porn.

I will give it one thing: the cinematography has a couple of exceptional moments. The gaunt torturer has shots worthy of "Nosferatu", and as the movie suddenly shifts into increasing (and totally unexplained) phantasmagoria, there are a couple of eerily beautiful shots here and there.

But that's all I have nice to say about it.

Then, as if it already wasn't once but twice an awful movie, it shifts again, with a deus-ex-machina shift audaciously ripping off "Jacob's Ladder" and also somehow "The Wizard Of Oz" which, I'll give it credit, does explain everything, but with the cheapest possible excuse, so cheap that it's pretty much insulting to the viewer. And then, when the story should be over, it throws in on gratuitous final twist that is simply cruel, and does finally define this movie as a torture porn.

I mean, I don't know. What an audacious movie: the plan was apparently to make a complete piece-of-shit movie, and try to redeem it with admittedly skilled cinematography and a brazen "and then it turned out all to be a dream" ending. So at least it wasn't actually just your typical dull pursuit flick, or your typical dull torture porn, they made some effort to make it something else. But it takes until the movie's last 60 seconds to find that out.

And the cinematography was nice.

But it's just not worth sitting, through unless yokels chasing a guy, or a creepy dude torturing guys, are your idea of an enjoyable movie plot. Because until the last 60 seconds, that, and a few passing moments of admittedly cool cinematography here and there, are all you get.