Charles Band and Full Moon have been major contributors to the world of b-cinema for decades. Reliable, sometimes repugnant, sometimes transcendent — a viewer will know before the opening credits are over that there will be at least one outrageous moment in a Full Moon flick, even if there is a fair amount of crap to wade through. Shadowzone, from 1990, is about as prototypical as a Full Moon movie gets. It doesn’t come close to blowing a viewer away like the uncensored version of Castle Freak, but it has none of the mind numbing crassness of an Evil Bong flick. It’s a simple, cheap horror flick, and it rips off Alien.
From writer/director J.S. Cardone, Shadowzone tells the tale of hunky Captain Hickock (David Beecroft), who has been given the task of investigating the death of a human test subject at a project deep underground, in an old research bunker.
The bunker used to be packed full of scientists and soldiers, but since the end of the Cold War and its peace dividend military budget cuts (where, oh where have those days gone?), the place has become shambolic. Nothing seems to work, and the lone maintenance guy, Tommy Shivers (Frederick Flynn), is grossly incompetent. But, that’s okay, because the small research staff on site aren’t a group of major leaguers, either.
The project is being run by Dr. Van Fleet (longtime That Guy actor James Hong). His closest aide, and something of a ditz, is Dr. Erhardt (Louise Fletcher). Technobabble is handled by Wiley (fellow That Guy Miguel A. Núñez, Jr.), while the task of looking pretty goes to Dr. Kidwell (Shawn Weatherly). Lu Leonard rounds out the cast as Mrs. Cutter, an irascible cook along the lines of Lunchlady Doris.
The team is conducting a sleep study that, somehow, opened a portal to another dimension and allowed a monster to slip through. I’m not shortening what the scientists have done for brevity. There is an expository scene where Erhardt is explaining 
the project to Hickock, and she goes from saying something like, “we discovered brains can wake themselves up from sleep when threatened,” to, “and it opened up a portal to another dimension,” in the very next line. Skipping over scientific details like that is glorious, and only adds to this flick’s shitty bona fides.
So, there’s a monster running around the bunker killing anyone who happens to stumble upon it. Oh, and a power failure has locked everyone in the bunker, there is no communication with the outside world, and the air is running out. That is a pretty standard recipe, with slight variation, for an Alien ripoff. And there is nothing wrong with that! Some of the best horror and/or b-movies have been made using that exact same formula. Lest we forget, Alien was a ripoff, too.
This flick, though, is on the lower end of the Alien ripoff spectrum. The set is bare bones, almost to the point of being something The Asylum or Roger Corman would finance at their most stingy. The screenplay is a little thin, possibly because there wasn’t cash for much more. But, in Hong, Fletcher, and Núñez, at least there were professional cast members, even if flubbed lines abound.
Shadowzone is a movie that will feel very familiar to fans of sci-fi monster horror. No new ground is broken at all. It’s a comfy blanket, but one that is worn quite thin. The most accomplished aspect of the film is the creature. It comes in many different forms, and is quite icky. Cardone, again probably because of budget, used the creature effects sparingly, and chose to go heavy on building tension. There are some very tense sequences in this film that all seem to go on just a touch too long. The running time wasn’t padded, but some ruthlessness in the cutting room was called for. Taking this movie down from 88 minutes to 80 or so could have done wonders for pace.
Shadowzone is one of those middling shitty movies that had the seeds for something more watchable, but for a myriad of reasons, mostly relating to budget, became something anonymous. It has the pedigree, but not the execution. It slots into the lower half of the Watchability Index, taking over the #301 spot from Anthropophagus.