With Chloë Grace Moretz as its star, “Shadow in the Cloud,” which debuted at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, is bound to attract much more attention than your typical indie horror release.
Deriving obvious inspiration from the classic “Twilight Zone” episode “Terror at 20,000 Feet,” the movie is set aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress on what is supposed to be a routine supply run from New Zealand to Samoa at the height of World War II. Moretz is an irresistibly brave and plucky young officer who sneaks aboard carrying a Macguffin, I mean a briefcase full of Top Secret Orders Which Must Not Be Opened, Do I Make Myself Clear, Captain? The screenplay then proceeds through a series of surprises too predictable to reveal here. If I were feeling uncharitable I would say the shots of the spectacular New Zealand landscape are the most exciting thing in the picture.
The unexceptionable Message underneath this mess is that Women Are Brave Warriors Too, and that this need not conflict with their femininity. This leads to battle scenes that switch back and forth with tender maternal scenes so rapidly the transitions made my head spin. I did question whether the fact that I found the juxtapositions so jarring was really an aesthetic judgment, or a consequence of Societal Expectations I have absorbed over a lifetime despite being a committed feminist ever since I was aware of anything political. You won’t find this film offers any greater challenges than that, though if you’re a fan of Moretz and horror or war movies, it’s an enjoyable enough hour and a half.
With a similar running time and a shared theme of domestic violence, “Paranormal Attraction” (available on Amazon Prime video) is also an indie horror flick. It lacks a star of Moretz’s popularity to draw the punters, which is a pity because the last third of the movie is more interesting and certainly scarier than anything in “Shadow in the Cloud.”
Unfortunately I have to report that the lead actor, Brooklyn Haley as Sara Myer (a “Halloween” tribute, I’m guessing) is also the movie’s greatest handicap. Her performance is both obvious and stilted, and she is far outshone by the supporting cast, notably Eden Shea Beck as her “bestie” Kelly, Nicole Cinaglia as her policewoman love interest Evelyn, and Hunter Johnson as the bestie’s stoner boyfriend Nick.
What we have here is your basic haunted house plot crossed with your horny teen slasher (though the characters are technically adults) crossed with what my comic strip alter ego calls the “dumb cookies getting sliced up” picture. Because Sara and Nicole have a love affair, the film could be classified as LGBTQ interest, although this relationship is treated as a matter of course (as it should be, in my view).
As I’ve already hinted, the first hour of the movie is a slog, with the wooden Haley getting far too much screen time. I admit I’m one of those horror movie buffs who tends to giggle through all but the very scariest bits, but in my opinion the jump scares during this part of the picture were telegraphed far too obviously to frighten anyone, and the trope of the ghostly voice whispering was so overworked that it started to draw what the late Roger Ebert used to call a bad laugh. The intentionally comic bits during the movie’s first two thirds worked far better than the horror, at least for me.
The domestic violence theme is treated far more seriously in “Paranormal Romance” than in “Shadow in the Cloud,” where it is little more than a plot device. And it is this that gives the last half hour of the former picture its power. I can’t refrain from adding that I was uncomfortable with the fact that the main character’s abusive stalker ex-boyfriend Jeff (Darell M. Davie) is black when all the leading characters are white. It’s not that anything is made of this racial “angle,” but given the fraught history of the scary black rapist in American movies and pop culture, the filmmakers should have thought twice about this.
[bctt tweet=”Movie Reviews by Martin Berman-Gorvine – Shadow in the Cloud and Paranormal Attraction @MeshuggeWriter #horrorreview #horror #horrormoviereview” username=”theboldmom”]
