Hello Enthusiacs I am your Lord of Shadows and today we go back to Hollow Man when director Paul Verhoeven, best known for RoboCop and Total Recall, decided to put his stamp on the story of the invisible man.

I personally find this movie to be a mixed bag. The idea, that being invisible removes our moral compass is an interesting one. The movie however jumps from one stage to another way to quickly. We go from immature pranks to rape and murder within about ten minutes of each other.

However we are getting ahead of ourselves. The story is about scientist working for the military to create a invisibility formula to create super soldiers. We begin watching a test run on an ape. The effects are one of the things that really hold up very very well.

This could have become cartoon time but instead really looks like what you would expect a creature becoming invisible would look like.

Now if you’ve watched a science related movie in the last couple decades you know what happens next. The government is going to shut them down so the project lead Sebastian Caine, played by Kevin Bacon, takes it upon himself to go forward to human testing on himself.

Once again the effects are quite good. From this point on the movies idea is to see Sebastian Caine slowly descend into madness as the Hollow Man. We start with taking this in a comedic direction with him going surprising people and pranking others because he is invisible.

However then we take a darker turn as he begins to suffer from a major case of cabin fever. However rather than treating it like cabin fever he turns into a sexual deviant who becomes invisible undressing a sleeping coworker before taking off for home home.

Now this is where Caine completely flips from someone you could route for to the beast of the film. Raping his neighbor brutally before going on a killing spree.

Like I say movie monsters are fine and this movie works as a good monster movie but when you see Verhoeven’s name you expect it to be more than that. Nothing against the film it is a good monster movie but I feel like it could have been more than that.

I’m not going to give away anymore of the plot because this movie does have a few fun twist in it. I highly recommend it to horror fans just don’t be looking for anything more than what you expect.

Kevin Bacon and cast give a fantastic preformance and given the lines that takes some real talent to not have this be a cliche fest. Bacon in particular should be given props for how much hard work had to be done to get this performance, from multiple takes to massive amount of makeup, just to name a few of the complications involved with this film.

In fact the entire cast is clearly giving this their a game which is what elevates it from five dollar bin horror shit, to a fun dark comedy morphing into a massively disturbing flick.

Until next time I am your Lord of Shadows saying

Stay Scared.