The Daily Dig: The Shadowed Mind (1988)

“The Shadowed Mind” trumps the girl in peril trope by dishing out a gender-neutral slasher who kills with impartiality.

A woman checks into a clinic for people with sexual degeneracy and maladjustment only to find a killer lurks amongst the patients. Let’s dig into 1988’s THE SHADOWED MIND, directed by Cedric Sundstrom!

As I See It

One of the “rules” of indie filmmaking is that you write for the resources available to you. You don’t write a film based in a bank unless you have some serendipitous access to a shuttered bank that is in transition to become a dispensary (quite specific, but based in reality).

What seems to have happened here was the production had access to this massive factory facility, ripe for being dressed up, and shoehorned their clinic/asylum story into the setting.

After the initial, jarring juxtaposition of rust and grime to what is supposed to be a clinical setting, you kind of forget about it or at least forgive it because the production design is pretty damn good.

The whole film looks rather good. The characters are a bit chintzy at times, but overall, I can’t say anything took me completely out of it.

They play with the old adage “if you fornicate, we will ablate” (I may have made that up) and kill both males and females after sex scenes. Equal opportunity slaying here.

The climax is a big sex scene, revealing the killer, which is not much of a surprise. We closed out on a final image, which was the cover art for the film.

It was a nice little journey through depravity, which had Ozploitation vibes.

Famous Faces

Rufus Swart (Paul) played Mark in Richard Stanley’s brilliant Dust Devil — one of my favorite Digs.

Of Gratuitous Nature

Sex lends to the story. It is, after all, a plot about a group of “dysfunctional” sex addicts. There is no dearth of egalitarian nudity. For that, I could give it all a pass.

Male frontal nudity, female nudity, a queer male sex scene; the film has it all. Perhaps the most poetically redeeming moment is a nude shower kill of a man. It’s not something that you could call common for the era.

Heartthrob

Adrienne Pearce (Stephanie) is a sight. She was packing some heat under those loose-fitting shirts and really embodied the eroticism of eighties genre cinema. I would even say she had a bit of a Kelly LeBrock thing going on, minus a bit of charisma.

Ripe for a Remake

Honestly, there is such a diversity in proclivities that you could make it work in today’s atmosphere. If you could craft some interesting neurosis and play with depravity in a way that doesn’t threaten the audience, it could be sellable.

Spawns

No progeny to report.

Where to Watch

Severin Films released a Blu-ray in November of 2022. You can stream The Shadowed Mind on Tubi (we covered it on our Tubi podcast, Untold Horrors, right here), Flix Fling, or Midnight Pulp.