Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #209: Shadow Hours (2000)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of the late Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
The impossibly lurid 2000 melodrama Shadow Hours is one of a surprising number of Rebecca Gayheart movies that are not available to stream legally anywhere. The first DVD I had for it didn’t work, so I had to order a second one from Amazon.
This gave me way too much time to contemplate its uniquely unappealing DVD box art, a badly photoshopped image of the disembodied torsos of stars Peter Weller and Balthazar Getty behind a faceless man being suspended by his wrists in a seedy tableau accompanied by the words “The Darkness Awaits.”
It looks less like a movie poster than an album cover for a bad industrial duo: The Shadow Hours proudly present their debut EP The Darkness Awaits.
This generic image of depravity and moderate star-power does a terrible job of conveying the film’s appeal. Shadow Hours has an almost suspiciously stacked cast. In addition to Robocop, the Noxzema Girl and the acting scion of the Getty dynasty who made fun of David Lynch in David Foster Wallace’s article about the making of Lost Highway, Shadow Hours also stars Brad Dourif, Peter Greene, Michael Dorf, Richard Moll, Frederic Forrest, Downtown Julie Brown, Corin Nemec and Johnny Whitworth.
How are you going to have Chucky, Worf, Parker Lewis, Bull from Night Court, A.J from Empire Records and MTV’s Wubba, Wubba, Wubba girl in the same magical motion picture and not highlight their inexplicable presences as blatantly as possible?
Instead the movie’s DVD box merely establishes that it’s “edgy” in a facile, juvenile fashion that’s not real but rather a cheap Hot Topic imitation. In that sense it does accurately reflect the tone and substance of the film, or rather lack thereof.
Shadow Hours is the glibbest and most superficial of morality tales. It’s a seedy, sensationalistic cross between The Devil’s Advocate, Fight Club and After Hours whose primary strength is an appropriately outsized, scenery-chewing star turn from the great Peter Weller as Stuart Chappell, a debauched libertine who isn’t just a bad guy but rather the worst guy.
I’ve heard of face-lifts but this is ridiculous!
That’s right: in Shadow Hours Peter Weller is pretty much the devil and he has seen things make Dante’s Inferno look like Winnie the Pooh, a line he repeats more than once. He’s a coke-snorting, wine-guzzling, sex worker-fondling, soul-corrupting anti-Christ with a line of verbose patter that is supposed to be pulp poetry rich in street corner philosophizing. Instead he comes like a guy doing a bad impersonation of a Henry Rollins rant at an open mic. He’s Happy Harry Hard-On 2.0, only instead of dropping his truth bombs on the unwashed masses via pirate radio, Stuart unloads them directly onto the fragile and frazzled psyche of Michael Holloway (Getty) his hapless protege in the ways of sin.
The younger man is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic just barely holding onto his hard-won sobriety while working the night shift at a gas station in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood to support his pregnant wife Chloe Holloway (Gayheart).
At work one lonely night this lost soul meets Weller’s modern day Mephistopheles, a wealthy and mysterious pleasure seeker who takes a shine to him. The struggling wage slave is flattered by the rich, powerful man’s attention and his gifts, expensive suits and gobs of cash to help pay for things like ultrasounds.
Stuart doesn’t come right out and confess to being the Prince of Lies but if he’s not the LITERAL devil he sure talks an awful lot about the guy. Stuart’s actions speak even louder than his words and his words and actions are both EVIL.
Weller’s spiritual corrupter starts with money and clothes and soon works up to boozy bacchanals with women of the night and after hour trips to an opium den that doubles as a pit of human sadness.
Under Stuart’s sinister tutelage, Michael loses his precious sobriety and begins using again, something that drives a wedge between him and his wife/the mother of his child.
Stuart takes his weak-willed protege in all things wicked on an extended tour through the seediest parts of the Los Angeles underworld. He introduces him to sex clubs and then hardcore BDSM sex clubs and fight clubs where, just for fun, the older man nearly beats a bare-chested brawler to death with his fists.
It isn’t until Stuart lures Michael into the world of Murder Clubs where horrible men bet on Russian Roulette and hope for the worst every time that he begins to realize that if someone represents evil in its purest form and costs you your sobriety, marriage, job and soul then they are not your real friend and you’re probably better without them in your life.
As morality tales go, Shadow Hours is pretty fucking stupid and facile but thanks to Weller’s scenery-chewing turn as Lucifer let loose in the Los Angeles night it’s seldom boring.
An obscenely over-qualified supporting cast certainly helps, beginning with Dourif as Roland Montague, Michael’s boss and mentor in the tricky, dark art of graveyard shift. Roland copes with the insanity and darkness of his profession by embracing Southern dandy-hood in all its glory.
Dourif gives his eccentric gas station manager a molasses slow and thick Southern drawl that seems to belong a thousand miles away from the film’s urban dystopia.
Like the role of Stuart Chappell, urban anti-Christ, the part of Roland Montague is not good by any stretch of the imagination. But it is juicy and the pleasure that Weller and Dourif take in going way over the top proves infectious. Gayheart, alas, is stuck in the thankless role of the loyal and disappointed partner.
There’s nothing Gayheart can do with a nothing role in a movie with little use for women as anything other than partners and figures of sexual temptation. Shadow Hours is a man’s movie through and through, but even that’s giving it too much credit, as its target audience isn’t actual men but rather the kinds of easily impressed guys and bros whose worlds were rocked by The Boondocks Saints AND its sequel.
Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are five so far, including Shasta McNasty and the second season of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders