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.
**
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