A semi-pretentious urban sleaze film, Shadow Hours offers Balthazar Getty--sporting a "BZAR" knuckle tattoo and a Charlie Sheen look as a recovering drug addict working nights in a Los Angeles filling station to support an angelic pregnant wife (Rebecca Gayheart). Getty is tempted to the wild side by sharp-suited mystery man Peter Weller, who takes him on a tour of nocturnal weirdsville: piercing clubs, bare-knuckle boxing arenas and big-money Russian roulette parlours. Getty comes to suspect that Weller is a perhaps-demonic serial killer who has been turning women's... heads (literally) and calls in cop Peter Greene. But he also goes back to dealer Frederic Forrest to get back on drugs and is stuck with get-in-the-way boss Brad Dourif. The film has a good cast and the germ of an interesting idea, but ends up as just another drama about a backsliding rehab guy and nighttime folks. It works hard on being shocking without going all the way into Clive Barker territory, despite advice on extreme underground culture from shock-tactics queen Lydia Lunch and some nasty fishhook facial sculpture. The ending suggests Weller might be a semi-supernatural character, but cops out of dragging Getty all the way down to hell. Weller, who grabs most of the best lines ("I've seen things in this city make Dante's Inferno read like Winnie the Pooh"), is an interesting, ambiguous villain, but everyone else is very standardised. Writer-director Isaac H Eaton clearly has a large collection of David Lynch videos and watched Fight Club several times. On the DVD: Sound is presented in both 2.0 and 5.1, while the widescreen presentation looks a lot better than the full-frame video release. In addition, there's a trailer and a photo gallery montage of arty looking frame blow-ups scored with pounding weird-rock. --Kim Newman [show more]
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