Over the last few decades, comic book movies have reached heights of storytelling and spectacle that readers could never have DREAMED of. But for every triumphant high—The Dark Knight, The Avengers—there have always been a good number of stinkers… some bad enough to become punchlines or talking points, but most mediocre and ultimately forgotten…

Until they end up here.

The Discount Spinner Rack is where you’ll find the worst, the weirdest, and the most puzzling of comic book movie misfires. We’ll take a look at the things that actually work and the parts that absolutely don’t, and decide whether it’s worth your time and your dime. In the end, movies will be marked down on a scale from $1.00 (a surprise gem) to $0.05 (better used for kindling). In part two of our BATMAN KNOCK-OFF PULP HERO TRILOGY, we’ll be peering deep into the hearts of evil men with the off-beat 1994 disappointment, The Shadow!

In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman changed the face of blockbuster cinema forever.

Raking in over $400 million on a $48 mil budget, the film was like chum in the water for Hollywood’s studio sharks. Suddenly, they saw this hot new zeitgeist to chase—a largely untapped popular market that could bring them returns like they’d never dreamed. All they had to do was figure out what it was!

Now, the rational thing that might pop into your mind (with all our post-MCU hindsight) is that this means “superheroes”. Batman is one of the most famous comic-book superheroes of all time, so just make more movies about colorful costumed crimefighters! Simple, right? But this thought either didn’t OCCUR to filmmakers… or, more likely, they recognized that Batman isn’t exactly LIKE most comic-book heroes (who tend to be more colorful, upbeat, uncomplicated… and also usually have an array of snazzy superpowers that would be really expensive to realize on film or television). They didn’t want a misfire like Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. They wanted another Batman.

And who could be more like Batman than a character that directly helped inspired him?

The Shadow’s history is kind of wonky. See, originally the Shadow wasn’t actually an adventure character of any kind: he was a radio show host. The name and persona were invented in 1930 for a broadcast called the Detective Story Hour—which was based on the ongoing Detective Story Magazine, a pulp fiction book from Smith & Street Publications collecting lurid detective and mystery stories. The show’s producers decided to invent a sinister narrator to introduce the individual segments… and so they created the Shadow, a mysterious figure whose ominous voice would bookend each story.

The magazine’s publishers had hoped that the radio show would boost the flagging sales on Detective Story. But in an ironic twist, listeners found the macabre narrator to be a far more compelling draw than anything that was happening in the detective stories—so fans were turning up at newsstands in search of magazines featuring the Shadow HIMSELF. Which didn’t actually exist.

Smith & Street Publications, eager to strike while the iron was hot, hired writer Walter B. Gibson to fabricate the Shadow largely out of whole cloth. And fabricate he did, churning out 282 stories over the next twenty years, starting with The Living Shadow in 1931!

THIS Shadow introduces a number of literary hallmarks that would become standard for superheroes in the coming decade: secret identities, a distinctive costume (shrouded in black from head to foot, with a billowing cloak, a bright red scarf wrapped around his mouth, and a wide-brimmed fedora), garish recurring villains, the works! But also… this version is wildly, WILDLY overcomplicated, because pulp writers in the ‘30s got paid by the word.

See, the Shadow’s real name in these pulps is Kent Allard… but readers weren’t told that initially, as he was kept a mysterious figure who maintained not one, but MULTIPLE secret identities. Formerly an aviator who fought for the French during World War I, Allard is eager for greater adventures after the war ends, and decides to take up fighting crime[footnote]… Seriously. That’s his whole motivation. He thought it’d be fun to fight crime. Because he wasn’t allowed to shoot down Germans in airplanes anymore.[/footnote]. He fakes his own death in a plane crash, and moves to New York City under his various aliases to amass intelligence and recruit allies to his cause. One of those allies is Lamont Cranston, an idle, wealthy playboy who happens to RESEMBLE Allard… allowing the Shadow to assume his identity while Cranston is out of town!

It’s… it’s a lot.

But things get even messier in 1937, when the Shadow made the jump back onto the airwaves for his very own radio broadcast! The massive success of the pulp novels made it an inevitability… but when it came time to re-adapt the Shadow for a radio drama, some notable changes were made to the character. First (and most predictably): the multiple secret identities? Gone. The Shadow was now the REAL Lamont Cranston, wealthy playboy[footnote]Yet another of the inspirations Bill Finger and Bob Kane drew from while creating the Batman…[/footnote]. After all, why put a hat on a hat?

But more significantly, while the pulp Shadow had been a stealthy and theatrical (but otherwise entirely human) crime-fighter, the radio show decided to saddle him with hypnotic powers. Why? Because it would’ve apparently required too much time and energy to narratively explain over the radio how the Shadow crept about the villains’ hideouts without being seen.

So instead, the conceit was developed that the Shadow had the ability to “cloud men’s minds”, making himself INVISIBLE so that he could enter or exit any room undetected, and only make himself known when he chose to speak[footnote]Interestingly, this meant that the radio Shadow actually DIDN’T wear a costume; since he was invisible, there wasn’t much of a point to it. But all the promotional materials featuring the actors VOICING the Shadow still feature them wearing fedoras and capes, so… go figure.[/footnote]. It was explained that he developed these hypnotic powers whilst traveling as a young man across the globe and the Orient, which…

… Wait. Really? Oh. Oh, no.

Uh… did I mention that one of the people who voiced the Shadow for this program was a young Orson Welles?

Point is, the Shadow is a gangly mutt of a character—dreamed up in fits and starts across different mediums, and rarely terribly consistent between them. But he was also a known I.P., with cross-generational appeal and brand recognition—so goddamn it, Hollywood was inevitably going to come calling!

The film rights were actually purchased by producer Martin Bregman and began development at Universal Pictures way back in 1982, but not a lot came from this; apparently Robert Zemeckis was involved with the project for a while, but to no avail. Famously, however, a young up-and-coming writer/director named Sam Raimi, fresh off the success of Evil Dead 2, pitched Universal on a Shadow movie back in 1987. The pitch was rejected… but then Raimi reworked his treatment into an ORIGINAL property, loosely based on the Shadow, that the studio went ahead and bought. That project would evolve into the bonkers Liam Neeson action-thriller Darkman, which came out in 1990 and ended up riding the Batman hype train farther than ANY other movie I’m going to be talking about in this series.

Seriously, though—have you seen Darkman? It’s soooooo good. Go watch it! I’ll wait.

So anyway, Universal spent the next three years doing precisely jack sh*t with the Shadow rights, until suddenly 1990 rolls around and they decide to hire screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) to take a crack at it—likely because a certain black-clad vigilante-superhero blockbuster finally lit a fire under their asses.

Koepp took multiple passes at the script, experimenting with tone while throwing elements from the pulp novels and the radio show into a blender. In his search for the character’s deeper motivations, however, Koepp latched onto the radio show’s tagline “[w]ho knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”, and decided that the Shadow would know because he had FELT that evil in himself… manufacturing an ENTIRE NEW LAYER of backstory to the character.

The film would reveal that Lamont Cranston had once been a brutal imperial warlord in the mountains of Tibet, running a drug empire under the name “Ying Co”. But he was kidnapped and trained by a Tibetan Buddhist tulku, or holy man, to develop powers of hypnotism and telekinesis (because Buddhists can… do that?), so that he can battle evil in all its forms in order to atone for the atrocities he’s committed.

In filling the fedora of the scarf-clad crimefighter, the production managed to nab Alec Baldwin[footnote]I am aware that there may be a degree of controversy around Baldwin at this point after the infamous shooting on the set of Rust, the low-budget film he was a producer and star of. Honestly, however, I do not know enough about the situation to be able to comment on it meaningfully, but I do hope it’s clear that, in discussing the actor’s earlier work, I am not in any way trying to minimize or ignore the tragedy of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’ death. My sympathies go out to the family of Mrs. Hutchins, and I can only hope that such senseless accidents can be avoided in the future.[/footnote], whose suave voice, tall build, and square-jawed looks were perfectly suited to playing millionaire playboy Bruce Way—I mean, Lamont Cranston. And as for the direction, Austrailian Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, Highlander 2: The Quickening) managed to land the gig after working with producer Bregman on an HBO original movie called Blue Ice. Hey, sometimes it just comes down to networking, y’know?

So The Shadow finally arrived in theaters in 1994, and was met with resounding critical praise and massive financial success, breaking one box-office record after another on its way to sweeping the Oscars—

… Alright, alright, I’m yanking yer chain. This was a BIG ol’ dud.

The movie only brought in $48 million worldwide on a budget of $40 million[footnote]Which SOUNDS like a win, but when you keep in mind that theaters keep half of the box-office grosses and that marketing costs can sometimes be as high as the film’s budget? Yeah, this movie ended its run in the red.[/footnote]. Audiences were baffled by this bizarre pulp throwback, based on a character whose most lasting pop-culture footprint came from a radio show that had stopped broadcasting in 1954 (which would be perfect if their target audience was exclusively nostalgic sexagenarians).

Even more baffled were the Universal studio execs, who quietly shelved plans for an ongoing franchise, and then sulked back to the mansions that Jurassic Park had bought them the year before.

But is this quickly-forgotten flop truly as wretched as its meager earnings and 37% Rotten Tomatoes score would suggest? Or is there something worth salvaging here… maybe a glimmer of goodness hiding at the heart of a bloated and corrupt Hollywood misfire? Like Lamont Cranston himself, can The Shadow be redeemed? Or was it doomed by its own sloppy and exploitative origins as a cash-grab to capitalize on a bigger hit? Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of this movie?

Time to find out if the weed of derivative work bears bitter fruit.

IN THIS ISSUE: (*sigh*)

… A sloppy, lazy Batman impersonation. Of course.

It has all the same problems people have with the Burton film: style over substance… an incoherent final act… and like all the movie’s stale rehashes, it mistakes the ‘40s aesthetic of Bob Ringwood’s costume designs with an actual, textual fixation on the literal past. So this is a capital-P Period piece, set explicitly in 1930s New York City, and absolutely wallowing in art-deco design, retro fashions, and matte-painted cityscapes.

And to be fair: the period detail is fantastic! The clothing is glamorous and sharp; the cars are charmingly chunky. Some of the matte shots in this movie are absolutely gorgeous, and there’s also a ton of intricate and elaborate model work that makes the world feel expansive and tactile. It’s a joy to look at!

Unlike the other two films in this “trilogy” we’re discussing, however, this emphasis on spectacle actually does have a thematic justification for being there. Because when you get down to it, this is a movie about appearances, and how they can mask the truth.

Lamont Cranston is a man with many different appearances. When we catch up with him in New York, he presents himself as a suave, sophisticated playboy, downing martinis and charming the ladies at a local nightclub. But when evil is afoot, he dons his black cloak, red scarf, and wide-brimmed hat to confront it as the Shadow… his face even changing as he adopts this new, sinister persona (don’t worry, we’ll get to the prosthetics). And to actually BATTLE crime, he also clouds men’s minds with his hypnotic powers… becoming invisible, in another layer of deceiving appearances. Under it all, however, lurks Cranston’s memories of the brutal and vicious warlord he’d once been—depicted visually in the film as a sleazy and decadent creep by way of his long, greasy hair and his disgustingly thick and uncut fingernails.

The central conflict of the film comes down to Lamont struggling with the question of which of these many faces is actually the REAL him.

To better explore this conflict, the film pits Cranston up against a villain (played by John Lone) who represents his worst fears about himself: a monster, murderous and cruel, who wields similar mental powers to the Shadow. Despite his malevolence, however, he’s also charming and witty; the two share multiple scenes together exchanging polite banter and disarming small talk with a lingering undercurrent of menace. Lone’s character knows how to play the part of a “civilized” man, but at his heart he’s a hedonistic barbarian, and he enthusiastically accepts that—embracing his worst self with total abandon.

And that character’s name? Shiwan Khan, the last living descendant of Genghis Khan[footnote]A factoid that may actually be WAY off base, as Genghis Khan is believed to have millions of descendants alive in the present day—though just how many there actually ARE has not been demonstrated conclusively.[/footnote], who wants to…

… to…

Oh, for God’s sake–!

Yellow Peril? They’re doing a YELLOW PERIL villain in a movie from 1994?!

Are all these movies just screwing with me at this point? Why is there always something deeply, horrifically WRONG with all these cheesy pop-culture artifacts I dig up?[footnote]Obvious answer: it’s because there’s something deeply, horrifically wrong with the CULTURE that produces this popular entertainment.[/footnote] I mean, I know they were going for a 1930s vibe with this flick, but did they have to jump into the deep end of shameless, overt racism?

I mean, yes, there IS a single Asian character in this film who’s not a stereotype (Dr. Roy Tam, a Chinese scientist who helps the Shadow—played by Sab Shimono)… but whenever the film depicts any aspect of an Asian culture, it’s presented as either Orientalist mysticism, drug-fueled corruption and decadence, or… well, THIS:

Ugh.

So Shiwan Khan wants to conquer the whole world, and the way he’s gonna DO it is by hypnotizing brilliant scientist Dr. Reinhardt Lane (a pre-superstardom Sir Ian McKellan, presumably doin’ it for the paycheck) into building an atomic bomb for him. This seems to be a common staple in period-set blockbusters—y’know, the villain gets their hands on a world-changing invention before it’s supposed to exist, like gunpowder or airplanes or internet porn or something, and plans to use it to rule the world. It’s a pretty stock plot.

Though… hmm. I suddenly realize that I might not be making it clear just how strange the presentation of this stock plot actually IS. Like, this story itself may be basic, but aesthetically, this is a weird-ass movie:

Anyway, Dr. Lane also happens to be the father of Margo Lane[footnote]A name I can’t hear without thinking of Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeve Superman films, in a rather spectacular coincidence.[/footnote] (Penelope Ann Miller), this movie’s designated love interest. Now, Lane was a character created for the radio show[footnote]She was specifically created because the cast was all male, and the producers wanted to create some some vocal contrast.[/footnote]. She was Lamont Cranston’s girl Friday: his one confidante who knew about his double-life as the Shadow. But to fit into this weird-ass movie, Lane has been saddled with PSYCHIC POWERS; she’s immune to Cranston’s hypnosis (though she’s still completely zonked by Khan at one point), and she can read his thoughts—even slipping into his dreams. This makes her valuable to the Shadow, but a danger to Lamont… because she can see right through all of his façades, and on some level, he’s terrified of who she’s going to see when she looks at the real him.

Baldwin and Miller have a sparkling chemistry, in particular during their back-and-forth, entendre-laden screwball exchanges (of which there are a disappointing few). Margo IS a far more active character than most mandatory love interests, and I appreciate how much of an outright oddball she is. But she doesn’t get a lot of screentime in the movie, because this film is CRAWLING with supporting characters.

Most prominently, you have Peter Boyle as Moe Shrevnitz, a yellow cab driver who serves as the Shadow’s dedicated chauffeur. Why waste a comedic talent like Boyle on a tiny role with only a handful of comedic one-liners? Who knows![footnote]The Shadow knows…[/footnote] But we also have Dr. Roy Tam, a scientist the Shadow rescues at the start of the movie, who literally is only in the movie to explain the concept of an atom bomb to him. OH! And also, Tim friggin’ Curry is in this as a slimy scientist turned sniveling toadie of Khan’s. He’s just here to give the Shadow someone detestable to bully in the final act.

But in the end, the movie lives or dies on Baldwin’s Lamont Cranston. After all, it’s his dark side that the movie hinges on—his “shadow” is literally the title character. Yet for all the emphasis the movie gives to Cranston’s darkness, his evil deeds and his fear of relapsing into violent excess… there’s very little insight given into WHY Lamont became such a monster in the first place, or why ultimately motivated him to seek redemption (in fact, it’s suggested that the Tulku FORCED redemption upon him, robbing him entirely of agency). He’s largely a blank slate, because we don’t know what’s DRIVING him.

Now, Baldwin does bring a slightly sardonic edge to the Shadow that makes the character far more charming than he is on the page… but this also actively undercuts all the pathos of the character. Because there’s never a moment where he feels like he’s being sincere. He comes across as too self-aware of being in a silly pulp adventure story—everything is too HEIGHTENED, too melodramatic. Every line feels like it’s delivered with a wink.

It’s honestly like watching a whole film with Jack Donaghy as the hero.

Eventually the conflict comes to a head in a huge, abandoned art-deco hotel, where Shiwan Khan has constructed an atom bomb to nuke New York. The Shadow shows up, dispatches the goons, and confronts Khan… but Khan has an ace up his sleeve: the Phurba knife, a magic, sentient, telekinetically-controlled blade he stole from the Tulku. (It’s got a little face on it with sharp teeth, and it growls!) Now, the movie’s established twice that Cranston doesn’t have the skill to control the Phurba, but that Khan does. “You can’t even control yourself, how do you expect to control the Phurba?” Khan sneers as the blade inches towards the Shadow’s throat.

But then… Lamont closes his eyes, lets go of the knife, and suddenly he can just… control it. Just like that.

There isn’t anything to spur this character growth moment. Nothing really changes. He just does the thing he was already doing, but better. There’s a suggestion that this is a moment of Lamont mastering his own inner demons and finding enough peace to finally overcome his adversary, but… WHY? There isn’t any sort of added complication to spur on this character development, nor does Khan’s line seem to trigger an epiphany. It feels completely arbitrary.

So the Shadow chases Khan down a laundry chute, and the big final battle takes place in a hall of mirrors—because OF COURSE it does. Mirrors represent deceptive appearances, and they also reinforce the idea that Cranston sees Khan as a dark reflection of himself. Why is there a hall of mirrors just down the hall from the hotel’s laundry room? Who cares?! SYMBOLISM!!!

But eventually, Lamont gets fed up with the cat-and-mouse nonsense. His eyes go all black and he starts shaking violently, and all the mirrors start to buckle and crack—finally EXPLODING in one glorious cascade of flying glass, with Khan caught in the maelstrom (or rather, awkwardly composited into the maelstrom). I guess director Russell Mulcahy couldn’t help himself… he just had to end the movie with a Quickening.

Lamont basically lobotomizes Shiwan Khan with one of the shards of glass, and deposits the megalomaniac into a mental institution with all of his powers now neutralized (which is actually kind of a horrifying thing to DO to a guy—but whatever, he was a genocidal supervillain). Then we fade into Lamont and Margo making out for a bit, before Lamont walks off with a pithy one-liner (“I’ll see you later.” “Hey– how will you know where I am?” Lamont smiles as the music swells: “I’ll know”). Aaaaaaaand… that’s it.

(*sigh*)

This movie is about as deep as a puddle. Yes, there’s SOME effort to explore the theme of appearances versus underlying truth—what we see and how it can hide what’s really there, like how a fancy suit and good grooming can serve as a cover for the monstrous person employing them. But this theme is largely only paid lip service, stretched thinly over a trope-heavy genre film that’s mainly interested in hitting the biggest, broadest story beats and genre touchstones. The glamor girl who’s nothing but trouble… the foreign-coded, world-conquering bad guy… the looming threat of the nuclear bomb… It’s all paint-by-numbers pulp.

Ironically, the only thing worth recommending about this film are the surface-level details: the charmingly silly performances, the stellar production design, and Jerry Goldsmith’s playfully mysterious score. It’s all sheen, all gloss… but there’s not actually much of ANYTHING lurking in the heart of this movie.

IS IT WORTH YOUR DIME?: Not really. You could do a lot worse, but you could also do a HELL of a lot better. Everyone involved in this has done more interesting genre work, from Mulcahy’s Highlander to Alec Baldwin’s turn in the Mission: Impossible movies. Frankly, they should have just let Sam Raimi make the damn thing.

DISCOUNT PRICE: $0.25

FAVORITE BITS:

1. The Shadow Nose…: Possibly one of the strangest choices in the film is the decision to slather Alec Baldwin in a TON of prosthetic make-up every time he transforms into the Shadow. This was obviously done so that he would more closely resemble the figure on the old pulp novel covers, with bushy eyebrows and a large, aquiline nose… but the problem is that this completely ALIENATES us from Alec Baldwin’s humanity every time he puts on the hat and scarf, because he suddenly looks fake—like a wax sculpture of a man. But the funniest thing is that, every time he dons those prosthetics… he ends up looking REMARKABLY like the Darkman himself, Liam Neeson!
   
2. Professional Courtesy: The first encounter between Shiwan Khan and Lamont Cranston is played as a genial, weirdly friendly meet-and-greet, as if Cranston and Khan were a couple of negotiating businessmen or Hollywood executives talking over a movie deal. Khan compliments Cranston’s tie, Cranston cheerfully makes Khan a gin and tonic, and both men all smiles… but the undercurrent is one of danger and the threat of violence. It’s a brilliant illustration of the film’s (one) theme, as these two violent men take each other’s measure while trying to mask their own intentions (though Lamont is more skilled at it than Khan, whose boisterous and volatile energy seems barely restrained).
3. Hidden Fortress: One of the most interesting ideas in the movie involves the Hotel Monolith, a towering art-deco building Khan uses as his base of operations. For most of the movie, every time he chases Khan or any of his minions down, Cranston loses his quarry once they reach a large, fenced-off empty lot in the middle of downtown. But at the end of the second act, Lamont realizes that the lot isn’t empty after all: Khan has somehow managed to hypnotize the ENTIRE CITY OF NEW YORK into not seeing his forty-story luxury fortress. It’s a pretty clever and absolutely daft little twist, one of the few genuinely original moments in the whole film.
4. Eye Lighting: This one’s a pretty basic detail, but I just love how, every time Lamont uses his hypnotic powers in his civilian identity, his eyes go all black and his face gets shrouded in darkness—save for a single, sharp shaft of light to illuminate his twinkling, mesmerizing gaze.
   
   This kind of visual language goes all the way back to 1931’s Dracula or 1932’s The Mummy, as the power of Lugosi and Karloff’s malevolent stares were similarly highlighted; it’s good old-fashioned Hollywood mystique, and I am HERE for it.
5. Face Off: Behold: the coolest moment in the movie! Cranston awakens in the middle of the night, drawn by a woman’s ghostly calls, and steals into Margo Lane’s guest bedroom in his palatial mansion… only to find her sleeping. Sweating, clearly distressed, Lamont rushes over to the vanity mirror where he sees something on his face, and starts picking away at it. His finger digs deeper and deeper into the skin, pulling it away, tearing it… until he finally RIPS OFF HIS FACE to reveal Shiwan Khan beneath, the sight of which causes Margo to SCREAM… and then Lamont wakes up. It’s a moment of surreal horror that digs into Lamont’s fears about himself in a visceral and charged way, and the movie NEVER finds a way to top that energy.

NEXT ISSUE: As the knock-off trilogy draws to a close, get ready to SLAM EVIL with the 1996 adventures of that giant purple condom-man of the jungle, The Phantom! We’re gonna enjoy the antics to our friend Billy Zane. He’s a cool dude.