I should have liked this movie better. It made me change my mind about Tony Todd's effectiveness onscreen -- I used to think that he could just stand there in a crowd shot and he'd still be creepy, but having seen him kind of stand around for a lot of this movie not creeping me out I am now of a different school of thought on that topic. I am a fan, but his presence in this movie represents a definite nadir in his body of work.

Maybe he read the script and figured at least the check would clear. It's competent enough, a hybrid of supernatural stalker movie, zombie munchfest and women in prison flick with a little kung fu thrown in for good measure -- and again, I love these genres of movies, but as a fan I am also all too aware of the cliches of each genre that the screenplay seems to mark off as checklist items, and with all those cliches floating around it must have been sadly impossible to include too many fresh ideas.

As the film begins, Shadow, played by Tony Todd, is about to be executed for a string of homicides. But first, he has apparently completed some kind of ritual and as a result, the execution goes awry. Wes Craven made Shocker almost twenty years ago and this opening was already feeling like a cliche then.

Then there's a riot that ends with a number of dead guards and convicts being buried alive ... which of course will pay off because if you're making a zombie movie you have to have a shot of the corpses rising from the ground, Graham Engels style, right?

Years later, the prison is re-opened as a women's facility. If you've seen ONE of these movies you can check off the genre hoars one at a time -- the knocked up convict, the junkie, the gal who's willing to give some sleazy guy what he wants and another who's up for giving the lesbian guard some of what she wants, and the sympathetic guide to the population who expositionally walks our heroine, Solitaire (played with some convincing hard edges by Carla Greene) around the prison pointing out all the 411 on the joint. (Since this particular cliche is played by Misty Mundae, she's somewhat more interesting than she might otherwise be thanks to Miss Mundae's charisma, but it's a charm not necessarily earned by the role itself.)

Sooner than later Solitaire ends up in a fight with some of the prison's tougher denizens, which earns her a trip to her namesake ward and some exposure to a strange symbol on the floor of the cell -- you can guess what happens next.

Of course, Solitaire must have that certain connection with the murderous Shadow (a connection so easy to guess it could be the hundred dollar question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire), and of course there has to be a showdown ... this movie has a lot of "there has to be a (cliche)" moments and I could probably write up a phone book if I wanted to recount them all.

The fight scenes are nicely staged and shot, since the director Derek Wan is a veteran of the Hong Kong film industry who has worked with Jet Li on some of the Once Upon A Time in China films and Jackie Chan on Drunken Master 2. In fact, the action is well handled enough to redeem the film somewhat stylistically, and a late sequence with a mutant baby is pretty fun, but it's just not enough to drown out the less than inspired script by Richard Siegel and, I'm saddened to say, Michael Gingold of Fangoria fame.

The disc has a making of featurette that, like the feature attraction, is startlingly predictable. There are also the odd assortment of trailers for other Media Blasters releases and, of course, the trailer for the movie itself.