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Shadow Puppets: The Cube meets Lost

The world of low-budget sci-fi thrillers is littered with countless cliched plots, lackluster performances and cheesy special effects. For every successful indie production that breaks the mold, rising beyond its limited means to gain acclaim and cult status, there are those that try to copy the formula and fail. Such is unfortunately the case with Shadow Puppets, a new thriller in limited first-run release in LA, before showing up on DVD on July 24.

The premise is this: eight people wake up in a seemingly abandoned and locked-down asylum with no memory of how they got there, and are forced to work together to try to get out. Think The Cube meets last year's mainstream flick Unknown with a side of Lost (heck, the main characters are even called Jack and Kate.)

Apparently, in order to save on Shadow Puppet's minuscule $2 million budget, the entire wardrobe department was cut-- which, on the plus side, means Jolene Blalock is running around in her underwear for most of the movie. (I suspect that this may have been the whole point of the production.) For the ladies, James Marsters is likewise under-dressed. These two make the best of the silly dialog they're burdened with. Blalock actually seems to stretch some acting muscles, when she's not sounding like T'pol investigating the disappearance of some red-shirts on mystery derelict spaceship X.

Marsters doesn't disappoint, although his role loses any sense of credibility by the end. One hopes that better acting gigs are in his future; but if he takes more straight-to-DVD work, he may have trouble being taken seriously (think Ian Ziering's career). The always-great Tony Todd shows up to chew scenery and scare up some real menace. The other performances are less-than-stellar, with writer/director Michael Winnick casting his younger brother Marc in a role beyond his limited abilities (which, sadly, isn't saying much.)

For the first half of the movie, the suspense does ramp up nicely, with moody incidental music and a claustrophobic setting. But soon, the huh? monster gets revealed, the bad guy gets I.D.ed, and the story peters out, after running roughshod over any sort of suspension of disbelief.

I give it 2.5 stars out of five, for the first half.

See the movie's Myspace page for more info: http://www.myspace.com/shadowpuppetsmovie