Gremlins have long been a favorite creature of Hollywood, and we’re not talking Mogwai here. British Royal Air Force folklore about a beastie that tears planes apart in midair flew across the Atlantic, starting with Roald Dahl’s first kids book, 1943’s The Gremlins, which almost became a Disney animated feature. They remained an ideal subject for cartoons, starting with Warner Bros.’ “Falling Hare,” featuring Bugs Bunny going toe-to-paw with the diabolical sabotage of the gremlins. They weren’t always so adversarial: 1944’s “Russian Rhapsody” pretty much gave the story away with its original title, “Gremlins From the Kremlin,” as Soviet pixies take a swing at “Der Feuhrer’s Face.” Postwar, William Shatner went face-to-face with a destructive creature in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when he stared out of the window into The Twilight Zone. Of course, no one took him seriously. Why would you?
So Flight Officer Maude Garrett (Moretz) is at a double disadvantage when she sees something giant, bat-faced, and malevolent tearing up the B-17 she’s on. A woman, she is gruffly and obscenely told, has no place on a plane. For takeoff, she’s confined to the Sperry – the ball turret on the belly, the most dangerous position on a bomber – as a sign of how unhappy the misogynistic crew is about having her onboard. That puts her in the perfect position to spot whatever’s turning this Flying Fortress into spare parts, and an even more perfect position to be ignored by the crew whose lives she is trying to save.
Shadow in the Cloud plays to the cinematic roots of the gremlin with its own cartoon introduction, a knowing nod that doesn’t really fit with the rest of the film. That’s not an issue, because this high-flying creature feature feels like two movies smooshed together. One half is a broad drama about a woman’s place in World War II, mostly told from Garrett’s cramped position in the Sperry, a one-woman performance with the men’s voices and dismissive attitudes carried over the interior coms system. The other is an absurd green-screen action-horror that is as cartoonish as anything Warner Bros. turned out in those WWII shorts. There is a full-blown Wile E. Coyote gag that may be this year’s most accidentally audacious moment. (Not as in “creatively daring,” but in a “What were you thinking?” way.)
Of course it makes no sense. Credited writers Max Landis and Roseanne Liang machine-gun an absurd number of plot twists and developments into 83 minutes, and the second half is so completely removed from the first that they may have just written it exquisite corpse-style. That’s a point of contention: After allegations of sexual assault and abusive behavior leveled against Landis, Liang is reported to have handled heavy rewrites. She may want to keep his name on there to share the blame, and it undoubtedly has his heavy-handed, overblown brand of unlikely heroics – which would be fine, if the first half-hour weren’t a moody, if equally heavy-handed, character-driven period drama. More talk, or more monsters. Pick a side, Shadow in the Cloud.
Shadow in the Cloud is available now as a virtual cinema release.
This article appears in January 1 • 2021.
