Writer: Bill Gullo
Director: Dennis Iliadis
Every Party Has Some Uninvited Guests
Shadow Walkers (aka +1 or Plus One) is categorised as ‘horror’ on IMDB, but that’s a bit misleading. Although it builds up to a degree of far at the end, it’s not really what most people would class as a horror movie.
The story starts with David (Rhys Wakefield) visiting his girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw) at a fencing competition. The meeting starts well but ends badly for their relationship.
Later, David and his friend Teddy (Logan Miller) head out to a house party. Jill will also be there and David hopes to patch up their relationship.
Unknown to the party goers, something has crash landed nearby and released some sort of energy.
Most of the first 30 minutes of the film are scenes of typical teenage excess… or, perhaps, the sort of excess most teenagers hope for at parties. (Where was Melanie when I was growing up?) However there are a couple of hints about what is to come.
Act 2 starts with a power cut. After that things get weird. Now there are duplicates of all the party goers, except that the duplicates seem to be on a timeline a little behind the originals.
This isn’t The Butterfly Effect; both copies are existing at the same time, they can see and interact with each other. And that’s the problem: how far would you trust yourself?
The results are interesting as the script elegantly juggles the two timelines. Wakefield manages to be both wet and ruthless, Miller does a great job of providing the comic relief without becoming annoying. It all builds up to a final act where things turn nasty, culminating in an intense few minutes at the end.
There are certainly some very interesting ideas in Shadow Walkers, and I enjoyed watching it. However there was rather too much emphasis on the partying at the expense of story for my taste. I was also irritated by the ending; Iliadis and Gullo had a choice of multiple options and, in my opinion, made a mistake in choosing the safe one.
The story had the potential to be far deeper and darker.
So Shadow Walkers is an intelligent film which is good fun, but could have been so much more.