Shadow Zone: My Teacher Ate My Homework is a 1997 comedy horror film by Stephen Williams, the second film based on a Shadow Zone book.[1]
A Grim Reaper appears in a spooky classroom, then tells a tale about a student named Jesse Hackett, who hates his teacher, Mrs. Fink, and is soon doomed to be trapped in the Shadow Zone. After all, to enter the Shadow Zone, one merely needs a touch of evil.
Jesse Hackett finds a doll at a store resembling his teacher. Things start to take a turn for the worse when the doll comes to life. Jesse and his friends destroy the evil doll. Then Jesse Hackett and Mrs. Fink reconcile. Jesse never becomes an eternal guest at the Shadow Zone.
The Grim Reaper tells the audience that he hopes to see them doomed, and that he will have a room waiting for them in the Shadow Zone. Then with a chilling laugh, he walks down the school's hall to the entrance and disappears.
A retrospective review places the film in the veins of Goosebumps but has a very mixed assessment of the overall production in terms of children's horror achievements[2] Another recent review states: "There’s a decent spooky feel to it as far as these kid horror movies go. There’s a nice attempt here to combine the goofy horror with more of an interesting story."[3] The same review, comparing the film with the original book and another film adaptation of a book from the same series, finds it is a step up from Shadow Zone: Undead Express.