Shadow in the Cloud: Totally demented

Shadow in the Cloud (2020) • View trailer

Three stars. Rated R, for violence, crude sexual comments and relentless profanity

By Derrick Bang

Director Roseanne Liang’s cheeky little thrill ride — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services — is a tip of the aviator’s cap to an iconic Twilight Zone episode.

 

On steroids.

 

Flight officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) expected a bumpy — but otherwise
uneventful — flight from Auckland to Samoa. Boy, does she get a surprise!

Back in the 1960s, this New Zealand import would have been relegated to the drive-in circuit. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, you’d have found it in Friday’s late-night pay-cable time slot. Even so, it won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival: an honor it richly deserves, and is a perfect indication of what you should expect.

 

The script, co-written by Liang and Max Landis — director John Landis’ son (also telling) — is defiantly whacked. Liang and Landis make no apologies for contrivance and the violation of all known laws of physics and aerodynamics; indeed, they gleefully revel in this stuff ’n’ nonsense.

 

That said, Liang and editor Tom Eagles deliver an impressive level of tension and momentum. This baby moves. 

 

Although … not right away.

 

The film opens with a WWII-era public service cartoon that parodies “Falling Hare,” the 1943 Warner Bros. classic that finds Bugs Bunny battling a little gremlin. This foreshadowing thus established, we meet Flight Officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) on a military airfield in Auckland. It’s August 1943, late at night, and she’s scheduled to meet a B-17 bomber touching down only briefly, before resuming flight to Samoa with badly needed supplies.

 

The plane is christened The Fool’s Errand. (More foreshadowing.)

 

Maude’s left arm is in a sling, and she looks a bit worse for wear. She’s carrying a small dispatch case laden with top-secret papers.

 

Most of the seven-man crew is actively hostile to her presence, but her orders — verified by the plane’s pilot, Capt. Reeves (Callan Mulvey) — are emphatic: They’re to transport her and the case to Samoa. Lacking anything in the way of passenger space, the men get childish revenge by consigning her to the ball-shaped Sperry turret, fitted on the plane’s underbelly.

 

There’s no room for the dispatch case, which Maude insists can’t leave her custody. Quaid (Taylor John Smith), the top turret gunner — and the sole crew member treating her with kindness — promises to guard it.

 

So, into the turret she goes. We — along with cinematographer Kit Fraser’s camera — go with her. And stay with her.

300: Rise of an Empire ... fall of a movie

300: Rise of an Empire (2014) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for constant gory violence, nudity, profanity and a hilarious sex scene
By Derrick Bang

In case anybody has wondered, two hours of gore-porn is a total yawn.

Impressed by the battlefield savvy demonstrated by her enemy, Artemisia (Eva Green)
offers Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) a place at the head of her own army ... and,
as an added inducement, a place in her bed. Will this Athenian commander succumb
to such temptation? Do we care in the slightest?

Director Noam Murro hasn’t the slightest affinity for this material: no surprise, since his only previous big-screen credit is the 2008 comedy bomb, Smart People. I can’t imagine what led Warner Bros. to trust Murro with the sequel to 2006’s unexpectedly popular 300, but, then, I rarely understand what transpires in big-studio pitch meetings.

Not that Murro should shoulder all the blame, with so much to spread around. I doubt any director could have made much of the wafer-thin narrative that scripters Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad audaciously call a screenplay. I always thought writers endeavored to create characters whose thoughts and deeds would engage our emotions, but Snyder and Johnstad apparently believe the same can be accomplished with another splash of blood on the screen.

Not hardly.

Indeed, it’s difficult to remember anything else taking place during this flimsy excuse for a movie. Occasional scenes of stilted, woodenly acted dialogue aside, 300: Rise of an Empire is 102 minutes of disembowelments, severed limbs and decapitations, seasoned with some slashed throats and pierced eyeballs. And most of the interminable battle scenes are filmed in loving slow-motion by cinematographer Simon Duggan, with the gallons of splattered blood inserted later, via CGI sweetening.

If all the melees and close-up hacking and slashing were projected at normal speed, this film probably wouldn’t run more than half an hour. Which would be a good thing.

As an added bonus, this film’s 3D effects were added after the fact, contributing to the overall murky pallor that hangs over every frame. As was the case with Clash of the Titans and numerous other “fake 3D” efforts, many sequences are so dark that it’s difficult to discern what the heck is happening. Call that an unintentional blessing.

As adapted clumsily from Frank Miller’s graphic novel Xerxes — itself a sequel to his graphic novel 300 — this story occurs during the aftermath of the great battle that took place at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., when King Leonidas and his “brave 300” gloriously battled a much larger Persian army to a standstill. For a time.