Shadow Hours demonstrates to all filmmakers that when you're making a motion picture, being fast is a lot like being good. As long as you've got a talented cast and a rapid fire pace that's always plunging forward, that'll cover up a lot of deficiencies in plotting and characterization.
Michael Holloway (Balthazar Getty) is a recovering drug addict working the graveyard shift at a gas station in one of the seedier sections of Los Angeles. He wants to stay sober and take care of his pregnant wife Chloe (Rebecca Gayheart), but he feels more and more desperate and trapped. Then one night, a man in a black suit and a black sports car rolls into Michael's life. He says he's a writer named Stuart Chappell (Peter Weller) and he takes a shine to Michael. Stuart offers Michael a job as his assistant, which Michael eventually takes after the menial grind of the gas station gets to be too much for him. Stuart takes Michael on a journey into the night, exposing him to greater and greater depths of human debauchery and depravity until Michael's sobriety, marriage and even life are at risk. While that's going on, there's another ill-defined and poorly executed storyline about a police detective (Peter Greene) investigating a series of murders. This plot thread only exists to facilitate a more explosive and dramatic end to Stuart and Michael's more cerebral tale. It's vaguely explained, tangentially relevant and the actions of the detective don't make a lick of sense.
In a lot of ways, Shadow Hours isn't that good a film. Its story is basic and shallow. Its moments of drama are inorganically contrived. Its moral is muddled and confused. It has a lot of characters that don't serve much of a purpose. Yet for all that, it's still fairly entertaining.
Much of that is thanks to the blazing speed that writer/director Isaac H. Eaton brings to the tale. His scenes are short and briskly edited with a plentiful helping of visual montages to establish mood and tone, granting Shadow Hours a vitality and appeal that it doesn't entirely deserve. This movie doesn't slow down to establish or explain a whole lot, racing from beginning to end like a flaming jack rabbit running for a pond. That swiftness makes the good parts of the story seem sharper and keeps the bad parts from lingering long enough to be annoying.
The other significant positive to this movie are nice performances from characters large and small. Peter Weller is perfect as the wickedly mysterious and tempting Stuart Chappell and also appears to be having a lot of fun with the role. He takes a character that could have been unbearably pretentious and removes all the starch from him with a low-key but precise portrayal that embraces the jumble of the story and turns it into an asset. The script is never clear about certain aspects of Stuart Chappell, unintentionally I believe, and Weller takes that on and believably makes Stuart very human at some moments and quite something else at others.
Balthazar Getty is good, though he's never asked to do much more than convey the essential decency in Michael without making him seem like a boy scout. Rebecca Gayheart does everything that can be done with the clichéd girlfriend role. Peter Greene manages to make the police detective seem like a legitimate character until the script leaves him high and dry. Corin Nemec and Brad Dourif also manage to fill up a couple of unnecessary roles with some wit and flair.
In addition, Shadow Hours has an appreciable amount of female nudity, more than a hint of sexual perversion and some interesting snippets of dialog about the nature of life and human existence or at least what passes for it in L.A.
All in all, this is a low-budget, independent production that was worth making and worth watching. There are an awful lot of movies that don't reach that fairly low bar, so if you see Shadow Hours sitting on the shelf at your local video store, give it a try. It'll mostly likely be better than renting some other film you've never heard of.
Michael Holloway (Balthazar Getty) is a recovering drug addict working the graveyard shift at a gas station in one of the seedier sections of Los Angeles. He wants to stay sober and take care of his pregnant wife Chloe (Rebecca Gayheart), but he feels more and more desperate and trapped. Then one night, a man in a black suit and a black sports car rolls into Michael's life. He says he's a writer named Stuart Chappell (Peter Weller) and he takes a shine to Michael. Stuart offers Michael a job as his assistant, which Michael eventually takes after the menial grind of the gas station gets to be too much for him. Stuart takes Michael on a journey into the night, exposing him to greater and greater depths of human debauchery and depravity until Michael's sobriety, marriage and even life are at risk. While that's going on, there's another ill-defined and poorly executed storyline about a police detective (Peter Greene) investigating a series of murders. This plot thread only exists to facilitate a more explosive and dramatic end to Stuart and Michael's more cerebral tale. It's vaguely explained, tangentially relevant and the actions of the detective don't make a lick of sense.
In a lot of ways, Shadow Hours isn't that good a film. Its story is basic and shallow. Its moments of drama are inorganically contrived. Its moral is muddled and confused. It has a lot of characters that don't serve much of a purpose. Yet for all that, it's still fairly entertaining.
Much of that is thanks to the blazing speed that writer/director Isaac H. Eaton brings to the tale. His scenes are short and briskly edited with a plentiful helping of visual montages to establish mood and tone, granting Shadow Hours a vitality and appeal that it doesn't entirely deserve. This movie doesn't slow down to establish or explain a whole lot, racing from beginning to end like a flaming jack rabbit running for a pond. That swiftness makes the good parts of the story seem sharper and keeps the bad parts from lingering long enough to be annoying.
The other significant positive to this movie are nice performances from characters large and small. Peter Weller is perfect as the wickedly mysterious and tempting Stuart Chappell and also appears to be having a lot of fun with the role. He takes a character that could have been unbearably pretentious and removes all the starch from him with a low-key but precise portrayal that embraces the jumble of the story and turns it into an asset. The script is never clear about certain aspects of Stuart Chappell, unintentionally I believe, and Weller takes that on and believably makes Stuart very human at some moments and quite something else at others.
Balthazar Getty is good, though he's never asked to do much more than convey the essential decency in Michael without making him seem like a boy scout. Rebecca Gayheart does everything that can be done with the clichéd girlfriend role. Peter Greene manages to make the police detective seem like a legitimate character until the script leaves him high and dry. Corin Nemec and Brad Dourif also manage to fill up a couple of unnecessary roles with some wit and flair.
In addition, Shadow Hours has an appreciable amount of female nudity, more than a hint of sexual perversion and some interesting snippets of dialog about the nature of life and human existence or at least what passes for it in L.A.
All in all, this is a low-budget, independent production that was worth making and worth watching. There are an awful lot of movies that don't reach that fairly low bar, so if you see Shadow Hours sitting on the shelf at your local video store, give it a try. It'll mostly likely be better than renting some other film you've never heard of.