THE SWARM

BZZZZZZZ! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Don't bother with this one if you're after a monster movie: the creature rampage doesn't start until nine and a half minutes from the end, including the credits. And it's not that spectacular when it does finally arrive. For all its faults, at least the Irwin Allen movie of the same name delivered on the carnage and chaos: this restrained French non-horror localises its swarm damage to a handful of people in an isolated rural environment.

Most of the time The Swarm (La Nuée) is actually a very ordinary and non-horrific French drama about a young widow trying to support her two children by running a small locust farm: breeding the insects before grinding them down to make animal feed. The resultant product is of variable quality, and she can't get a good price for it - until by chance she discovers a significant improvement if the locusts' diet is supplemented with blood: fresh or bottled, human or animal. At this point you'd start wondering just how far she's prepared to go to preserve her secret and maintain the quality of her product, but disappointingly the answer is "not very far".

Eventually we do get a tiny bit of swarming locust action, and impressive close-up shots of locusts are dropped in throughout. But the film finally livening up in the final quarter of the final reel doesn't really fit in with the previous hour and a half of awkward domestics as a Quiet But Serious Drama. Sure, it's perfectly well done, but it's seemingly designed to underwhelm, unless the family tensions stuff is what you want, in which case all the entomophobia material is surplus to requirements.

**

JOLT

CONTAINS GZZZZZZZZZT SPOILERS

That sound, of course, being the onomatopoeic equivalent of the sound of heavy voltage rattling through machinery. The electric shocks in this defiantly silly but perfectly watchable Friday night dumbo action movie are smaller, to the extent of barely being shocking at all, but there's still a good measure of no-think fun and crunchy violence to be had.

Lindy (Kate Beckinsale) has to wear a special electric vest and self-administer jolts of electricity every so often. She was born with a tendency to irrational and violent rage and now has to zap herself every time she's on the edge of hulking out and beating seven bells out of whoever's angering her: aggressive diners, unhelpful restaurant staff, manspreaders on the underground. She thinks she's found a solution: a budding romance with a potential boyfriend after a couple of blind dates - but then the only man she's ever connected with gets murdered and (in the face of apparent police apathy and incompetence) goes out for headcracking revenge...

Set in America though it looks a lot like London (and apparently shot in Portugal!), Jolt's primary asset is Beckinsale's hilarious take-no-shit attitude which gets you past some of the sillier moments. It's not a great B-movie, but it's a fairly entertaining one: Stanley Tucci is always good value and Susan Sarandon turns up briefly in the hopes of nudging forward a sequel (Jolt 2: Electric Boogaloo?). Don't expect a gamechanging masterpiece and you may well enjoy it.

***

SHADOW IN THE CLOUD

SPOILERS AT FOUR O'CLOCK! INCOMING!

You probably won't see a sillier, less plausible horror movie all year. The streaming services are stuffed to bursting with the boneheadedly ridiculous, but this one makes them all look like Mike Leigh. The first big plot reveal is utterly absurd but it's comfortably outdone in the "oh, really?" stakes by subsequent twists, but crucially it's not breathtakingly silly in a fun, popcorn way: it's just silly in a wearing, tiresome way that I just couldn't go along with. Instead it lost me early on and never got me back on side.

Shadow In The Cloud is also stuck with being two movies bolted together in a way that doesn't really work. The first has Chloe Grace Moretz as a British accented flight officer with a fake permit to board a routine cargo flight and a mysterious package that Must Not Be Opened (and when the contents are revealed you'll eyeroll like a row of Vegas slot machines), whereupon the big tough mansoldiers indulge in a tidal wave of misogynist masculinity so toxic it could kill a horse at twenty paces. Moretz is immediately locked in the gun turret - and so are we, with the obnoxious tirades broadcast over the intercom. Sadly, what this means is that the guys are barely seen and in several cases barely distinguishable so when she finally gets out there's no emotional connection because we don't know who any of them are beyond shouty and abusive.

The second movie harks back to the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone, with gribbley  gremlin monsters merrily dismantling the engines and clambering around on the wings - which was fun when William Shatner did it back in 1963 and even when John Lithgow reprised it in the 1983 film version. Shadown In The Cloud's monster stuff is a lot more enjoyable than the What's In The Package? and What Is She Really Up To? first act, but as it goes on it gets increasingly silly as Moretz has to start clambering around the outside of the plane mid-flight while Japanese fighters whizz around trying to shoot it down. And that's not the worst of it: one subsequent moment is so ludicrous I actually seriously considered switching it off and going for an early night.

So it's a mess. Whether that was down to extensive rewrites and re-rewrites of Max Landis' script (after a string of sexual assault allegations), to the point where it just didn't, indeed couldn't, function any more, we may never know and frankly it's hard to care that much either way. Too much of it is too far-fetched even by the standards of late-night what-the-hell horror nonsense, and all the potential trash pleasure of watching Chloe Grace Moretz kicking gribbley gremlin monster ass on a plummeting B-17 is ultimately lost in the wreckage somewhere. Frustrating at best, with Moretz and the monster design probably being the best things on show, but occasionally veering towards a complete waste of time.

**