The first thing you need to know about 'Shadowzone' is that it's a blatant rip-off of a dozen other films from the same sci-fi/horror genre. The first that comes to mind is 'Alien,' but there are elements of plenty others in there, too.

It doesn't have much of a budget, which is a shame because there is a decent idea buried somewhere in it. What lets it down is that there isn't enough invested in the characters. Every one is a total stereotype and you know who'll be monster-fodder and who's going to make it from the word go.

It's about an investigator who does to a top secret military base to investigate the death of a worker. Once there, he finds the scientists are dabbling in doorways to other dimensions (never a recipe for 'happily ever after'). Then, we have a monster who - remains relatively unseen - as it bumps them off, one by one.

The acting isn't great, the special effects are stretched and what tension is pretty much directly lifted from Alien (check out the 'motion tracker' type scene which is almost totally taken from the scene in Alien where Ripley observes Dallas while he treks through the vents, plus the music which sounds almost identical).

It's not the worst 'monster-munching' movie out there. There are some nice moments here and there, but the overall vibe of 'seen it all before' outweighs what little good is there.

It's always a lot of fun to encounter a horror film with lousy production values and an overall shortage of talent, but simultaneously an incredibly ambitious plot to compensate for all that! "Shadowzone", for example, is a very cheesy and often ineptly accomplished B-horror movie, but you certainly wouldn't think so after reading the plot synopsis! J.S. Cardone, the weird guy who also made the early 80's video-nasty "The Slayer", thought up a complex premise with dream weaves, secret NASA-sponsored medical experiments and alternate dimensions … only to arrive eventually at a movie about a shape-shifting creature stalking and gruesomely killing people in an abandoned subterranean science lab. Dig this: our brain actually protects us when we sleep, because we naturally dream about horrific stuff during our nightly subconscious journey to a parallel dimension. The acclaimed Dr. Van Fleet is working hard to control and regulate this process by isolating the brain instructions. NASA is interested in the experiments, for their astronauts on future missions, but when of Dr. Van Fleet's guinea pigs dies under mysterious circumstances, Captain Hickock is sent in to investigate. When he requests to repeat the modus operandi on another living specimen, a murderous type of shape-shifting creature is unleashed and everyone is trapped down in the hermetically sealed of base. Once the monster is loose, all the pseudo-intelligent mumbo jumbo about alternate dimensions etcetera is thrown overboard and "Shadowzone" becomes an ordinary but nevertheless entertaining little horror flick. This is actually one of my first acquaintances with the works of Full Moon Studios. A friend of mine gradually intends to introduce me to this cheesy B-movie studio's greatest "classics", and I must admit he did a fairly good job starting off with "Shadowzone". The kills are inventive and the make-up effects are enjoyably nasty (there even is a delicious head-explosion). There's some welcome gratuitous nudity and wondrously hammy acting performances from washed-up cult veterans. James Hong stars as the fanatic scientist and Louise Fletcher, the unforgettable Nurse Ratched in "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest", is awesome as his assistant. The finale is kind of dumb, but hey who's complaining. Good trashy fun from Full Moon.

This movie is so slow it could put a hyperactive gerbil on speed into a coma. It starts slowly, slow burns through the middle, and ends on a decidedly low key note. You could call it 'atmospheric', but I'd probably go for 'snoozefest..'. It's not terribly made, and it's not an embarrassing clunker that anyone involved should be ashamed of, but it just fails to excite or entertain on any level. If you're looking for some so-bad-it's-good oldskool sci-fi cheese then look elsewhere.

OK I need 10 lines of text. How about that clumsy tag line, then:

"In Alien no one could hear you scream. In the Shadowzone that's all you can hear"

a more accurate tag line would be: "In the Shadowzone nothing much really happens, and then it just randomly ends"