Solitaire (Carla Green) goes to an all female prison. Too bad for her (and everyone else) that a notorious serial killer known as Shadow (Tony Todd) is about to come back-along with some zombies. Also, it seems that Solitaire and Shadow are somehow connected.

"Shadow: Dead Riot" is really three kinds of movies crammed into one as an tribute to old school exploitation: Gory Kung-Fu flicks ("Story of Ricky"), Women in Prison flicks ("The Big Bird Cage") and Italian zombie flicks ("Burial Ground.") While it looks great on paper, it sadly doesn't add up. This is partly due to the fact that none of these elements feel like they go far enough. Sure, there's decent gore gags, martial arts mayhem, and lesbian action, but it all feels somewhat restrained, as if the people behind it felt nervous about going too far.

Also problematic is the acting. Erin Brown actually does a pretty good job (I would have liked to see more of her character), and Tony Todd is decent enough (even though he looks too much like an evil version of Lee "Scratch" Perry-not exactly something that will strike fear into men's hearts), but everybody else seems unrehearsed or bored, spewing forth terrible dialog and bad one liners. Finally, some of the tributes and references to past European horror movies like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Burial Ground" are too obvious (though it's nice to see a horror movie that doesn't reference "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Phantasm" for a change.)

"Shadow: Dead Riot" is a movie that could have been a really fun tribute to the Exploitation movies of old. Sadly, it's refusal to go that extra mile ends up giving off that "sizzle without the steak" feeling. If you want to see a great tribute to old school Grindhouse movies, you'd be better off watching "Grindhouse."

I saw a trailer for this film at the Horrorfind Convention in Baltimore this past year, and it looked like some ode to 70s WIP exploit films with some gore and sleaze. I guess they showed all the good parts in the trailer. SHADOW: DEAD RIOT is a disappointing pseudo-exploit mess that is really no better than any other STV crap that's out there nowdays...

Tony (CANDYMAN) Todd plays some fake dread-locked voodoo guy that is a death-row killer. His daughter ends up at the same jail 20 years later, and a bunch of dumb sh!t happens. Oh- and there's a flying mutated cannibal baby...

I really got nothing' to say about SHADOW: DEAD RIOT. I was hoping for a ton of sleazy nudity and a rack of gore, and I didn't get it. There is SOME nudity, and even a little full-frontal - but I guess I set my standards a bit too high on this one. Misty (Erin Brown) Mundae makes an appearance too, which was nice - but didn't save the film. The flying mutated cannibal baby (which only makes a brief appearance) is definitely the highlight of the film. Too "by-the-numbers", not enough gratuitous sex/nudity (though there were plenty of slutty, big-jugged hos in the film...), and there were a few OK gore scenes, but not enough. A total "pass", unless you're drunk on a Sunday afternoon with nothing' else to watch...4/10

A serial killer/voodoo practitioner is executed in jail. But something happens and he explodes instead. His blood flows through prison and turns the inmates into zombies. The warden orders all shot and they bury them in the yard.

Years later the jail is now for females only. Some supposedly tough chick called Solitaire is incarcerated. She doesn't want to deal with anyone, but trouble finds her nonetheless. We meet the usual jail characters. The nice but clueless warden, her gorgeous enforcer, the baddest inmate of them all, her gang, and her servant (the lovely Erin Brown), a pregnant nice girl, the evil Dr who experiments on the girls by injecting them with someone's mysterious and powerful blood.

Things quickly turn violent between Solitaire and the bad muscular girl. But Solitaire also starts having visions about the voodoo guy. And whenever blood flows, the earth will suck it up, and people too end up disappearing. The pregnant girl gives birth to some monster baby. And voodoo guy is resurrected together with his army of zombies. That will lead to the eventual confrontation between Solitaire and voodoo guy.

Shadow: Dead Riot was somewhat of a revelation. Trailers of it looked quite awful, but it's a surprisingly good movie. It's not perfect or even good all around. In fact it's like two movies made by two different sets of people. One movies looks good, is well-acted, well-lit. The other looks cheap, is poorly acted, and boring.

When this movie is good, it's very good, it has a bit of the 70s look and feel to it and music by Vernon Reid. The action and fight scenes are outstanding, performances are good, the zombie aspect is also well done with lots of attention to detail, stunts are superb and there's some gore and a bit of nudity.

The problems though include the main character and the lead actress, poor acting by some actors, the cheap CGI effects, the lighting in some sets, the live sound with pronounced echo.

Usually movies that combine different genres altogether don't work at all. But Shadow does. It's a women-in-prison movie with lots of fights inspired by the precision of martial arts, with zombies, and the supernatural. All of these aspects work very well. And I'm more than willing to overlook the negative aspects, after all this isn't a A-level or even B-movie. It's a C+ movie that dared to be different. I wish there had been more emphasis on the women-in-prison theme, more nudity, more gore, more of Andrea Langi, Ruby Larocca and Erin Brown.

Shadow was produced by the same team that produced Flesh for the Beast, another excellent C level horror movie that I'm very fond of and that is overall more consistent than Shadow. Here they had to compromise a bit more but they also took more chances and tried to make an ambitious movie with few resources.

If you give Shadow a fair chance you won't be disappointed.