1990s American Horror Part Forty-Six

SHADOWZONE

(1990)
Dir - J.S. Cardone
Overall: MEH

B-movie writer/director J.S. Cardone paired up with Charles Band's Full Moon production company for the sci-fi/horror hybrid Shadowzone; a mediocre yet adequate creature feature done in the bog-standard straight-to-video style of countless others at the turn of the 1990s.  The monster is largely kept off-screen and is given a nifty hook of being able to physically appear as its victim's most primal fears, which is something that has to do with it spawning from some sort of subconscious nightmare realm that is discovered from covert medical experiments conducted by Louise Fletcher, James Hong, and the "damn enchiladas" man himself Miguel A. Núñez Jr..  The most immediate aspect of course is the very presence of Fletcher, so seeing a former Academy Award winner having to play dead while a smiley animatronic puppet gently caresses her is the stuff of unintended hysterics.  Fletcher gives the material an air of sophistication that it hardly deserves, but all of the performances are surprisingly void of scenery-chewing and Cardone maintains a serious tone, playing its Alien-adjacent framework straight.  

 

THE ARRIVAL

(1991)
Dir - David Schmoeller
Overall: MEH

For his follow-up to Puppet Master, director David Schmoeller made the comparatively less goofy yet still D-rent genre offering The Arrival.  It is a sci-fi/vampire mash-up where an elderly grandpa gets possessed or something by a crashed extraterrestrial and then de-ages into a different actor while simultaneously craving women's estrogen-laced blood.  Yum.  Taking a schlockless approach to the material, Schmoeller stages it as a tragedy where and old man gets another chance at life, (and a chance to romance his adorable nurse that is fifty years his junior), only for it to be perverted into an alien survival story where said being from another planet finds love and just begins to enjoy Earth's splendor, only to be taken down by the cops.  Even with some lazy dream sequences and mild nudity, it is mostly a dull, monotonous series of not-graphic murders followed by law enforcement officials showing up at the crime scene one step behind the perpetrator.  Some cameos from Stuart Gordon, his wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, and Michael J. Pollard are fun, plus John Saxton goes way outside of his comfort zone playing a...wait for it....police detective.  These are the jokes folks.

 

MYSTERY MONSTERS
(1997)
Dir - Charles Band
Overall: MEH

 

Charles Band channels his patented B-grade Full Moon Productions schlock into family-friendly form with 1997's Mystery Monsters, one of many projects that he put into motion which features pint-sized critters.  The concept is simple enough; what if a Captain Kangaroo/Mr. Rogers-type children's show featured actual demonic minions instead of puppets.  It writes itself from there, utilizing cheap sets and/or abandoned locations that were likely utilized after-hours, with a small cast of unfamiliar faces doing more admirable work than the purposely dopey material deserves.  They even manage to have a finale where empty cardboard boxes are tossed around, because of course.  To be fare, there are a handful of laugh out loud moments, particularly where Caroline Ambrose and Sam Zellar's ruthless, interdenominational warlords are concerned who engage in hilarious fish-out-of-water behavior when they put on suits and infiltrate a television studio in order to acquire the monsters of the title.  Naturally due to the PG nature of the presentation, gore, naked ladies, and profanity are omitted from the proceedings, but ghastly stuff is still alluded to in a tongue-in-cheek fashion that never takes itself seriously.  Unfortunately, the pacing starts to drag after awhile since the plot is too rudimentary not to run in circles, plus the ending is even more underwhelming than the overall lack of production values.