Director/Screenplay – J.S. Cardone, Producers – Scott Einbinder & Carol Kottenbrook, Photography – Michael Cardone, Music – Robert Folk, Visual Effects Supervisor – Richard Malzahan, Makeup Effects – Mark Shostrom, Production Design – William Maynard. Production Company –Sandstorm Films.
Cast
Scott Glenn (John Cain), Angela Alvarado (Ray Whitesinger), Benjamin Bratt (Nakai Twobear), Robert Beltran (Frank Totsoni), Tim Sampson (Alen Begay), Frederick Flynn (Captain Jake Bader), George Aguilar (Daniel Nez), Lee de Broux (Percival John ‘P.J.’ Moore), Nancy Linehan Charles (Hattie Moore), Beth Broderick (Bobby Cain), Geraldine Keams (Doctor), Gloria Reuben (Cayla)
Plot
John Cain, a detective on the Los Angeles police force, admits to his captain that he is off in his work because his wife has left him for another man. Cain’s captain sends him on an assignment so that he can get away from it all for a few days. The assignment takes Cain to an Indian reservation in Arizona to pick up wanted murderer Nakai Twobear. Cain arrives and takes custody of Twobear, although the reservation police are fearful of Twobear, calling him a Coyote Man, a type of sorcerer. While they are driving, Twobear causes Cain to see an illusion of himself on the road and crash, during which he makes a getaway, taking Cain’s gun. Cain joins the reservation deputies and Navajo tracker Ray Whitesinger as they set out to follow Twobear’s trail. All the time, Twobear taunts them, including being able to enter into Cain’s dreams.
J.S. Cardone is not a widely recognised name but was responsible for a body of well above average thrillers throughout the 1990s and 2000s and is someone who should be given wider recognition. Cardone made his directorial debut with the slasher film The Slayer (1982) and followed with the rock film Thunder Alley (1985). Cardone subsequently made a variety of films as director, almost usually all psycho-thrillers, including the dream horrors/alternate dimension film Shadowzone (1990); the thriller A Climate for Killing (1991); the road movie thrillers Black Day, Blue Night (1995) and Outside Ozona (1998); the vampire film The Forsaken (2001); the murder mystery True Blue (2001); Mummy an’ the Armadillo (2004), a psycho-thriller set in a roadside cafe; the erotic thriller 8MM2 (2005); and the zombie film Wicked Little Things (2006).
Elsewhere, Cardone has also written the scripts for the killer android film Crash and Burn (1990), the thriller Exit in Red (1996), the sf film Alien Hunter (2003), Renny Harlin’s The Covenant (2006) and the remakes of Prom Night (2008) and The Stepfather (2009), and has produced several Sniper sequels and Vampires: The Turning (2005).
Shadow Hunter came out in the 1990s amid a minor spate of American Indian-based thrillers that included the likes of The Dark Wind (1991) and Thunderheart (1992). The progenitor of these was Nightwing (1979) with Nick Mancusco as an Indian police officer on a reservation facing a horde of rabid vampire bats. While the other films were theatrical releases, Shadow Hunter seems like a B+-budgeted attempt to jump aboard this bandwagon.
Scott Glenn as Detective John Cain
Like these other films, J.S, Cardone constructs Shadow Hunter as a Police Procedural. He goes with the reliable standby of the detective who is an outsider in a different culture blundering his way through. To some extent, this was also the viewpoint taken by some of the other abovementioned Native American policiers as well where they usually made the protagonists into Westernised Indians who were rediscovering their heritage, whereas here Scott Glenn is a white detective in a different culture. Scott Glenn gets a reasonable backstory as the detective and gives a good performance. One of the best aspects of the film is the relationship he strikes up with Angela Alvarado as the Indian tracker, with she giving a strong and intelligent performance.
Unlike the other abovementioned films, Cardone makes the elements of the supernatural real – or possibly psychologically ambiguous. Cast as the sorcerer, Benjamin Bratt gives a performance that is positively demoniac – the most evil that one has ever seen Bratt on screen. Cardone directs some undeniably effective scenes like where Bratt starts sniping as Scott Glenn and Angela Alvarado are crossing a river on horseback, ending with Glenn having to rescue her from where she is trapped underwater beneath the horse’s fallen body. Cardone even makes good use of the clichéd dream jump with an electrifying sequence where Scott Glenn wakes up and finds the entire camp has been slaughtered.
Almost every single source online lists the title of the film as one word Shadowhunter, although the credits of the film spell it as two Shadow Hunter.
