Overall: C-
Directed by:
Michael
Winnick
Starring:
James Marsters
Tony Todd
Marc Winnick
Jolene Blalock
Shadow
Puppets is the story of
eight seemingly random people who wake up in an abandoned asylum, none of them
with any memory of how they got there. As they meet up with each other, they
begin to search for a way out. But there’s some kind of sentient shadow monster
lurking, which is hunting them and picking them off. They find a machine apparently
used in experiments on erasing memories, and they rightly figure that since the
machine was used eight times, it must have been used on them. [Reasonably minor spoilers] But when they
find a ninth stranger in a coma, they realize that one of them has not had their memories erased, and that
person must be the one behind everything. And so the traitor in the group is
discovered and begins trying to kill everyone. [End spoilers]
This
movie suffered the most from having way too many characters introduced in way
too short a period of time. And because they don’t learn their names until
halfway or more through the film, I was just giving them insulting nicknames
the entire film, because otherwise I had no way to tell who was who.
The
story starts off somewhat intriguing, with the strangers in the asylum,
wondering what their pasts hold and why the building seems abandoned… but as
soon as the (poorly animated) Shadow shows up, it just gets somewhat… silly.
Its presence is never really explained (or rather, the explanation makes no
sense.) If the pseudo-monster had been removed in favor of focusing just on the
idea of the science experiment on their memories, it would have been an
improvement. And anyway, most of the characters get little individual
screentime outside of our mains, so when they’re killed and in danger it didn’t
resonate any with me.
There
are also several small but silly inconsistencies (things as simple as the
characters constantly complaining that they’re freezing, but never wrapping
themselves in the sheets they all have from the beds they awoke in.)
The
movie was okay, but it started far better than it finished, and had more than a
few moments that were unintentionally funny out of sheer ridiculousness.
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