Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 14, 2000, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If there’s anything worse than an exploitation film with delusions of grandeur, it’s one that can’t even deliver on the exploitation, much less the grandeur. Such is the case with Shadow Hours, which purports to take viewers on a frightening journey through the dark heart of Los Angeles, and instead carries them through a series of borrowed ideas and not-very-shocking images familiar from other movies.
Balthazar Getty stars as Michael, a recovering drug addict working the night shift at an LA gas station. One night, he’s approached by a smooth-talking man claiming to be a writer named Stuart Chapell (Peter Weller), who’s in need of a companion to take journeys into humanity’s dark side in the name of research. Michael and the audience are supposed to be increasingly unnerved by the dank recesses Stuart leads them into, horrifying dens of debauchery like—a strip club! And then—a fight club! And then—my gosh!—a place where people wear tattoos and pierce their bodies! Forget Hardcore, 8MM, Fight Club and any of a dozen other films that have already explored similar territory; you’ll see stuff more transgressive than this on any average episode of HBO’s Real Sex.
The idea, of course, is that Stuart is a Mephistophelean figure after Michael’s soul, tempting him to fall off the wagon and back into the fiery pit of addiction. Writer/director Isaac Eaton even casts Peter Greene, he of the significant resemblance to Weller, as a detective and drops a hint that he might be a God to Stuart’s Satan. Eaton’s writing is so shallow, though, and so dependent on the intrinsic shock value of the sin parlors he depicts, that the movie fails to register on an allegorical level, much less a simple dramatic one. There’s never any real doubt that Michael will resist the temptation and return to the modest but morally pure home he shares with his pregnant wife (Rebecca Gayheart, pretty good in a thankless role).
This is in part because Eaton, trying so hard to rock the viewer with how soul-chilling LA’s underbelly is, never dares to establish what might be subversively appealing about it. And if audience surrogate Michael can’t see the attraction of the darkness, what’s the point? In the end, Eaton comes up with a movie that could only possibly be shocking to people who would never see it in the first place.
