I just watched Shadowzone for the first time tonight and as a big fan of horror/monster movies and B-movies in general I was looking forward to it. What I thought this was going to be was a big low budget monster movie, where a science experiment goes awry and everyone needs to escape to hope to survive. And that's kinda what it is ... but there are A LOT of slow moving scenes of nothing but people talking.
It's not like I would be even mad at that except for the fact that it's not what we're promised on the cover of the DVD! On the cover we see a picture of some alien-ish looking monster wearing a tattered lab coat so we can assume that would what happens to James Hong's character Dr. Van Fleet. But it isn't ... no we never see such a character and Hong's character doesn't transform into anything. In fact for a movie that puts the monster front and center on the cover we hardly ever see it and when we do it's just little 5 second glimpses. And I thought maybe it's going the route of the big reveal in the climax and then we'll see it on screen for a decent amount of time? No! Not even then, in the final act of the film we finally see it up close and can it's entire body but it's only on screen for about 2 minutes. It looks cool, you can definitely tell it's low budget but that's ok but it barely gets any screen time. That was a major disappointment for me I was ready to see the monster I was promised on the cover but never saw it.
What saved this movie from being a total snoozefest we're the characters. James Hong is always fun to see, we have his female assistant who for some reason is always putting chapstick on, the other hot bombshell blonde scientist, a black guy who's a computer whiz, a fat, smoking female cook who used to run a whorehouse and a hillbilly maintenance man named Shivers. Also our main protagonist the Nasa investigator played by David Beecroft who out of all the characters is unfortunately the most boring. He just has no personality whatsoever, he never seems bothered when anyone dies and mostly all he does is stand around and ask questions. He doesn't really even figure anything out, it's all the people around him that do all the work, clearly he should not have been the main focus. All the other characters have quirks and funny attitudes that when they play off each other is entertaining to watch.
Other than that there's really not much to this movie, the ending is a pretty big anti-climax. It doesn't really end it just sorta stops. It's as if the film makers said "well that's all we really had so we're done, the end." Again if this movie put it's focus on the monster instead of endless scenes about the science experiments, if Hong is a bad guy or good guy, what's going on in the facility, a weird dream sequence that didn't really make a whole lot of sense, animals ... because they were testing on animals before, I think. Yeah it just got so boring and you so don't care, I just wanted to see the monster come out and rip people to shreds. People do get ripped to shreds ... offscreen! Yeah we don't really see much, it's mostly just blood splatters and then cut to the aftermath again with a few 2 second glimpses of the monster.
One more thing I really didn't get is why is a Nasa investigator there? This had nothing at all to do with space travel. The scientists were conducting experiments having to do with sleep. The experiment was honestly kinda hard to follow, a person in a glass tube slept and somehow through some sceince/techno babble a portal to another dimension the "Shadowzone" was opened up and the monster came out through their body. It was a bit confusing to follow but a monster came from another dimension, how doesn't really matter. Anyway this Nasa scientist doesn't even look like he works for Nasa, he looks like a marine more than anything else. He has dog tags around his neck and never once even mentions Nasa, all they say is he's from there. Which on a sidenote, Nasa has investigators?
All in all if you like corny, shlock sci-fi horror or the movies of Full Moon pictures you'll like this. For me I do like both of those but this one was just a bit to slow and not enough monster. I did really enjoy some parts of it though which is why I can't say it was a total let down. The cinematography is nice, it builds a decent atmosphere around the characters, builds up suspense well and has a very nice B-movie horror theme song.
Shadowzone is definitely a movie to make fun of while you're watching. Gather up a few friends and some beers and you'll have an enjoyable time with it.
Review of Shadowzone
