Shadow Knows, The

What a good edit! This is easily the best form the movie has seen. It feels significantly closer to the pulps and does a wonderful job of getting rid of some of the awful jokes and flaws of the film. Highly recommended to anyone who even saw anything good that stood out to them in the original film. This is an objective improvement, and it is created very lovingly.

An excellent fanedit!

I had, totally coincidentally, recently re-watched 1994's "The Shadow" for the first time in well over a decade and walked away feeling it was a movie that could be improved with a solid re-edit. Lo and behold, I stumble across "The Shadow Knows" and find Lapis Molari has addressed every issue I had with the film! The movie now starts where it logically should, in New York, and the at times painful prologue sequence has been excised and repurposed as dream sequences. Well done! The new opening credit sequence is creative and well-implemented, and considering I'd just seen the theatrical cut recently I was astounded at how seamless the cuts were.

As noted in the change notes, the most noticeable - for me, probably because I'd just seen the theatrical cut - are the cuts to the finale, which do make it feel a bit rushed but it works well despite that. My biggest nitpick is something the editor could do nothing about: the fanedit is in 1.78:1 aspect ratio as presented in the Shout Factory blu-ray and not the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Aside from that, excellent!

Definitely recommended!

For me the question was not whether this edit would replace the theatrical cut for me, because that was already achieved by Bionic Bob's "The Shadow Strikes!" many years ago. The question was if this would be able to replace Bob's version. And the verdict is: it ultimately doesn't, but comes real close to doing so, and in any case stands proudly next to it.

On one hand, this has the advantage to being HD (which is both a blessing and a curse, given how terribly fake some of the backdrops look in hi-res), but on the other I tend to agree more with Bob's cuts, particularly the exchange about the tie. Yes, I know it was personal preference to keep it, and I get the intentions behind it (the old radio show inserted product placement this way), but for me it feels incredibly out of place. A good idea for me would have been keeping Khan asking about the tie, as it fits nicely with the "Nice tie" in a later scene (showing that Khan is loving modern American fashions just as he loved American bourbon), but then cutting to Lamont calling him a barbarian, without playing along. But again, personal preference is always respectable.

On the other hand, I absolutely LOVED the way the opening scenes were inserted as flashbacks. That was brilliantly executed (this did beat Bob in this aspect). I also appreciated the pulp covers in the new credits sequence, even if I would have wished for a few small tweaks. For instance, have the background fade to black under the title exactly when the music theme's strongest part kicks in and not slightly after, to give it more force. Incidentally, while I like the music Bob used for his opening, Goldsmith's awesome main theme (aka The Poppy Fields) is always welcome back.

UPDATE: After my original review, lapis molari went back and straightened out the technical issues I originally pointed out for a version 2 that's already uploaded. Except for the fact that the 1930s Universal logos remain pixelated due to a lower quality source, but that's very minor. The new version of the problematic "Next time you get to be on top" works much better, and of course gone is the flash frame. Now what was a very good edit already, turns into an excellent one. Highly recommended for every fan of pulp-style narratives.

And a big thank you for including subtitles! Since English is not my first language, having subs always makes things a lot easier for me.

I don't know whether to be Happy or Angry?

I had done a fan edit of The Shadow many years ago, and had been quietly planning on doing a Redux version in HD....
...but now, I don't really have to as Lapis Molari's fan edit pretty much checks most of my boxes.

This is a very solid and entertaining fan edit. The audio and video quality is excellent. No jarring technical issues such as flash frames were noticed.

Most of the cringey/inappropriate humour has been expertly cut. Lines like "oh that knife" has been seamless removed. Though as Saltl4f3 commented there is one brief sequence where a line of awful dialogue by the Shadow was simply muted it and covered with music, when a simple cut would have worked a bit smoother.

To maintain the mystery of The Shadow, Molari removed the prologue origin and then re-wove it into movie at different points as flashbacks. While I am uncertain if all the chosen imagery works or if the flashbacks play a bit too modern (I think a soft focus framing might have worked better to fit with 1930s film production style), the idea is brilliant and improves the narrative tremendously.

Overall, a FUN fan edit that left me yearning for me. So I guess, in the end, I am HAPPY! lol

BRAVO!

This was a great edit. I had some issues with the original film, which this edit almost completely remedies, such as the odd comedy and the slow opening. The new changes are so seamless at times that you wouldn't even know anything was different without looking at the changelogs; and some of the changes, such as the dream sequences, are so smartly done it's hard to believe it wasn't done this way to begin with.

A small detail I greatly appreciated was the inclusion of pulp and comic cover art during the opening credits. Very stylish.

The only part that caught my attention and made me do a double-take was the "next time you get to be on top" bit. In order to get rid of the joke, the line was muted, which creates an odd 1.5-2 second scene of the Shadow just menacingly staring at the guy's dead body in silence. Even though the goal was to erase the joke, it ended up still being kind of funny.

If you are a fan of The Shadow, then you owe it to yourself to see this version of the film.