I’m a sucker for genre movies about the supernatural power of dreams, since it frees filmmakers up to visualize just about anything they want onscreen.  From obscure oddities like Paperhouse & Beyond Dream’s Door to beloved horror-nerd classics like the Nightmares on Elm Street to artsy-fartsy pioneers like Un Chien Andalou, some of the most powerfully surreal images ever achieved in cinema have resulted from dreamworld genre fare.  That’s why it’s a little disappointing when a dream-logic horror movie lacks that ambition to astonish, instead relying on more pedestrian thrills like, say, rubber monsters and naked breasts.  The early Full Moon feature Shadowzone is one such disappointment: a low-budget, straight-to-VHS sci-fi horror about an Extended Deep Sleep trial in which the power of the dream-state human brain unlocks a doorway to an alternate dimension . . . and all that comes through that doorway is tits & monsters.  In any other context, tits & monsters would be a satisfying payoff for renting VHS-horror schlock, but here they’re a little bit of a letdown, especially considering how much more expensive and less expressive Shadowzone is compared to its fellow sleep-study-horror Beyond Dream’s Door.

Louise Fletcher revives her role as the low-energy sleep study doctor she plays in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, except now with a mad scientist bent.  Along with a fellow drowsy mad scientist played by James Wong, she conducts Extended Deep Sleep studies on naked models in the low-rent version of the hypersleep pods from Alien.  Just as they’re starting to discover the awesome, supernatural power the human mind can unlock when submerged in Deep Sleep for days on end, their work is suddenly scrutinized by a military investigator because one of their test subjects inconveniently popped like a balloon.  The flayed corpse of that experiment gone wrong promises a level of gore the movie will not match again until the very end.  Instead, the still-sleeping subjects’ powerful minds let an interdimensional monster through the doorway between worlds that the remaining survivors in the lab (and the audience at home) cannot actually see.  It’s only visible to the lab-equipment monitors, not to the naked eye.  Still, it kills them off one by one in their sealed underground bunker, like an invisible version of The Thing . . . until it finally reveals its admittedly fantastic creature design in a strobe-lit ending borrowed from Altered States.

There’s a meta-element to Shadowzone, where it’s so boring between its mutant creature attacks that you can’t tell whether you actually saw them or you dreamed them during an unplanned mid-film nap.  It’s possible that my unenthused experience with it was a result of presentation, since the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime is a half-hour longer than its normal listed runtime of 80min, and none of the additional footage includes the tits & monsters that provide its only sources of entertainment value.  What’s left is just empty space that could have easily been filled by whatever surreal, outlandish images the fine folks at Full Moon could dare to imagine, and instead is just long stretches of nothing.  The good news is that you’re likely in no danger of being bored or let down by the film yourself, since the only scenario when any reasonable person would have sought this out would be if it were still 1990 and your local video store had already rented out every VHS of the better titles it visually references: Alien, Altered States, and The Thing.  Now, you can just stream Beyond Dream’s Door instead without worrying that Tubi is going to run out of copies.

-Brandon Ledet