aka Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder

• Directed by Jamie Dixon
• Written by Michael Stokes (based on the story “The Shadow Builder” by Bram Stoker — although, despite the title, they didn’t give him a credit!)
• Starring
  • Michael Rooker
  • Steven Blum
  • Catherine Bruhier
  • Shawn Thompson

Due to the fair-to-middling success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it seemed for a little bit as if we were going to be deluged with half-assed adaptations proclaiming their authenticity by shoe-horning “Bram Stoker’s” before their titles; other entries in the trend include Bram Stoker’s The Burial of the Rats and Bram Stoker’s The Mummy (which is, I believe, the fourth adaptation of Stoker’s novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars). Fortunately, producers realized that a long-dead author who was in the minds of most people a “one-trick pony” didn’t have much drawing power long before we were subjected to Bram Stoker’s Laundry and Shopping List. But not before we got Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder.

We open with one of my favorite cinematic elements: the kickass priest. This one in particular is Father Vassey (Michael Rooker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), sporting a goatee, a leather jacket, and twin nine-millimeters with laser sights. His target is a heretical Catholic splinter group, led by an apostate archbishop, who’re hip-deep in some demon-summoning ritual; Vassey comes in with both guns blazing, but not before a cloudy black something claims a sacrifice (a guy named Lambert) and vanishes into the night.

Although Vassey tracks the shadow thing by noting the address on the sacrifice victim’s wallet, the shadow (moving at the speed of the absence of light, I suppose) arrives at their mutual destination first: The idyllic small town of Grand River, where an eclipse is supposed to take place in two days. It’s first local victim is the fresh-faced, clean-cut smalltown rookie cop (a demographic with as high a movie mortality rate as any) as he investigates a disturbance in the graveyard; the cloud surfaces, quotes from fragmentary sentences that we hard Lambert say before his demise, and, well, enclouds the hapless gendarme.

In the morning, we’re introduced to the rest of the Characters That Matter: beatific twelve-year-old orphan Chris (Kevin Zegers), who we know to be the final intended victim from the presence of his photograph back at the ritual; his guardian Aunt Jen (Leslie Hope), the local veterinarian; and small-town sheriff Sam Logan (Shawn Thompson, who resembles Roddy Piper to an unnerving and probably intentional degree), who’s sleepovers with Aunt Jen are Grand River’s worst-kept secret. In case you didn’t catch it, young Chris has been blessed with a Family of Convenience, giving him resources in fending off his demise that would be unavailable to, say, the child of advertising execs.

Sam is naturally called to where they find the young rookie’s body in the grave. The town doctor (doubling as the M.E.) discovers, by flashing his light on the shadowed corpse, that it flares into flame — or, as he immediately exclaims, “It’s helioreactive!” (Yeah, that’s a word on the tip of everybody’s tongue.)

Things escalate when the doctor gets the corpse back to the examining room — namely, it sits up and spews forth the black cloud again. When Sam comes to see how Doc’s doing on the autopsy, we finds Doc’s own helioreactive carcass (yeah, that word is now an official part of my vocabulary) which immediately crumbles to dust at the light from the door Sam opens.

Father Vassey, meanwhile, has been consulting with the local priest to get the following background (keep track, okay?):

Lambert was a jackass. (We already knew this.)

Lambert had a son, which is Chris.

Chris was baptized as an infant, at which time he manifested stigmata — spontaneous bleeding from hands and feet, in similitude of Jesus. As Vassey soon finds himself explaining to Sam and Jen, the Church regards such people as being free from the taint of original sin — and thus, very powerful magic if sacrificed by bad guys. Like the shadow thing, which is growing stronger and more humanoid with each victim.

I want you to realize here that we’ve not even gotten halfway into the movie here. The problem is that most of the cats have been let out of the bag. What takes up much of the rest of the movie are further victims of the shadow dude, running around town trying to find Chris, and attempting to defend him through tomorrow’s eclipse, which is naturally the perfect time for the sacrifice. Oh, did I forget to mention what the sacrifice is for? Seems that the archbishop’s little throng thought that God had royally messed up by disturbing the pre-existent void with His Creation, and apparently this shadow guy’s sacrifice of an Original Sinless child will Uncreate everything.

I should probably wedge a mention in here of Tony Todd as Old Man Covey, the one-eyed, dreadlocked town loony who may not be as crazy as he seems; somehow, he had enough precognition to steal tomato lights and Christmas lights from around town to make a ring of light around his hovel. I have to wedge this reference in, because the movie itself uses this wonderful actor and his character so slightingly that he wouldn’t even come up in my plot synopsis otherwise. (Despite being “Old Man Covey,” he’s not that old, but I think “Old Man” is the formal honorific for the local crazy.)

You may notice that I’ve not been referring to the supernatural heavy as “the Shadowbuilder.” This is intentional on my part, and for a couple of reasons. 1) He tries to present himself, as does Father Vassey, as being the great shadow created as a necessary side effect to God’s declaration of “Let there be light” — in other words, a grand Satanic destroyer figure. Yet the Father’s later explanation actually paints him as some kind of non-unique demon figure, the “factor obscuratis” or “builder of shadows” from his medieval textbook. 2) Despite the moniker, he doesn’t actually build shadows; rather, he sticks to them, being completely dispelled by light. 3) He’s a big guy in a black coat/robe, with long black hair and black facial appliances that, uh, probably looked really good on paper. In short, he’s goofy looking; I’m not going to credit him with a name beyond his merit.

Anyway, what spooky momentum we may have built up in the first half is largely allowed to peter away in the second. A very cool idea rears its head: That the demon’s presence is starting to poison the town, resulting in fights, depravity, and at least one axe murder. (The first sign of this is a truly chilling image: all the little children sitting on the concrete in the park in the warmth of the afternoon, calmly pulling the heads off their dolls.) This strikes me as the way a demon would really work; after all, if you accept the proposition that Satan wants people to be bad, the main mission of a demon would be to influence people to evil, right? Sadly, the only real result of this is that the shadow dude manages to turn some townspeople into Prince of Darkness-style minions to do his bidding in lit areas.

Likewise, the fact that the shadow shemp spouts recent quotes from his victims would lead one to suppose that he’s absorbing more than vague “power” from them; he’s actually making them a part of himself. But is there any inkling that he, say, uses the knowledge of any of his victims to his own ends? Of course not.

One other brief image makes itself noticed from amidst the average character of the proceedings: as the shadow fella builds up to the actual sacrifice (in the church, just to complete the blasphemy/irony), he chants the Genesis account backwards: “Day fifth the were morning the and evening the and” and so on. It’s delivered in such a smooth and natural manner that it proves a memorable image — one of the two, along with the headless doll mentioned above, to be retained after viewing.

The whole thing’s a more-or-less average supernatural horror outing, but it irritated me more than it should have. It took me several hours to figure out why: It’s a poor carbon-copy of The Prophecy (1995). Observe: An evil pseudo-Christian being seeking the life of a special child and being opposed by a cop and a surrogate mother figure. But whereas The Prophecy didn’t exactly have a coherent plot itself, it did make great hay from the spookiness that should truly be inherent in Christian mythology gone wrong (not to mention the inherent spookiness of Christopher Walken). Shadowbuilder did not; it is, if you’ll forgive me, a murky shadow of a better movie.

Some Notable Totables:

• breasts: 4
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Leslie Hope (Aunt Jen) plated “Kira Meru” in the DS9 episode “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”
  • Tony Todd is a Star Trek regular, having appeared as Worf’s brother Kurn on several episodes of TNG and DS9, plus the adult Jake in the DS9 episode “The Visitor” and Alpha Hirogen in the Voyager episode “Prey”