In the Flesh: Shadow in the Cloud

That this movie exists at all is baseline grotesque. John Landis killed a man and two children through his own arrogance and negligence while filming part of the Twilight Zone movie, and here’s his son Max consciously invoking the famous series entry ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ with a gremlin creature feature set on a B-17 flying fortress. On top of that, the younger Landis is a serial rapist and this movie is in part a clumsy attempt at exploring and overcoming the sexual harassment of women. How much of that is Landis’s original script and how much comes through director Roseanne Liang’s initially uncredited rewrites is unclear, but no matter how you slice it the entire enterprise reeks of the worst kind of insular Hollywood predator camouflage. Ah, well. Nevertheless!

Shadow in the Cloud boldly asks, “What if Alien ended with Ripley using karate to destroy the titular monster?” The answer it provides is that Alien would suck ass. Horror predicated on the idea of the main character's strength and resilience is one thing, but Shadow in the Cloud's initial gestures toward intimate, claustrophobic survival horror quickly fall apart in the face of its girl power action movie ambitions. Its special effects are laughable, its treatment of its own monster bland, inconsistent, and uninteresting. One moment it can rip through steel with its claws, the next it's cowering in terror in front of an injured 5'4 flight officer. Why have a monster at all if you don't understand what a monster is for? There's no sense of vulnerability here, no sense that this could end any way but happily. The hulking badasses in Predator feel more at the mercy of their hunter/quarry than Moretz does hers.

Liang and Landis's film isn't really horror at all in the final equation. It isn't frightening, shows us precious little abjection, and at no point threatens or subverts any social order beyond "this woman acts like a man so we respect her now". It does have a single good moment of gore -- a jellied shred of brain sliding over the flight deck as the plane banks -- but the rest is laughable CGI blood spatter. It's a shoddy movie, unambitious and ugly, its cast indifferent, its creature an afterthought. Throw in that dismally off-tone opening cartoon and some lukewarm hetero romance and sacred motherhood (the closing image is the only time the film trusts Moretz to use her face to express something, and it's miles better than anything else she does here) and you've got yourself the cinematic equivalent of a bowl full of half-congealed tapioca. Eat up.