Max Landis the screenwriter of Shadow in the Cloud. A name that has become synonymous with terrible and hackneyed writing. Yet, somehow, beyond all reason, the son of the great Jon Landis keeps failing his way from one project to the next. You want to talk about privilege, this guy is the poster child.

Take his latest ode too trash, Shadow in the Cloud. A movie so mired in the preposterous it may finally be enough to sink his career (knowing Tinseltown, I wouldn’t hold my breath).

Although he is listed as sole writer on the screenplay, the movie’s director has come out to claim he really had nothing to do with it. Uh huh. She may just be deflecting due to all those allegations of sexual abuse and toxicity against him. Either way, his stench is all over the project.

Surprisingly, the Shadow in the Cloud starts well. Heck, I’ll give credit where credit is due, it starts amazingly well. Chloe Grace Moretz plays a tough as nails Air Force courier… excuse me, flight officer, as she is quick to point out, who is assigned to transport a mysterious package on board a military cargo plane. It’s World War II, so of course the craft is filled with an all male crew.  Naturally, this leads to tension and the usual female harassment you might expect a woman to be shown while confined with a bunch of young men in what amounts to a flying tin can. Sure, it’s cliche, and a bit too much too often, but Grace gives as good as she gets, so it’s also engaging. In fact, the dialogue between said crew and Moretz’s Maude Garrett is so fast and witty it darn near zips around faster than the enemy planes that may be following them, and with more sparks!

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Early on in Shadow in the Cloud and in part because the pilot is awfully upset to suddenly get saddled with the extra weight, a woman no less, Maude is assigned the “only” open seat in the plane, the underbelly turret. It’s a confined space, not much larger than the actress now stuck within. Here, director Roseanne Liang really shines, making good work of helping us forget just how small the space is. In addition to the aforementioned dialogue, Liang wisely imbues the turret not with the excitement of riding under an airplane while watching the ground buzz past you hundreds of feet below, but with a sense of dread and malice. It’s a spooky, cloudy night out and the moon is full. Is that a Japanese fighter in the distance? Something… else? You almost wish the entire movie had stayed there.

Alas, it’s not to be. Maude eventually spots what appears to be a human sized creature on the plane’s wing. We later learn the monster is known in pilot lore as a Gremlin (think bat meets rat). Of course, the crew is slow to believe her, since these things aren’t supposed to exist, which only ups the narrative stakes as there isn’t much Maude can do trapped in her tiny turret.

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Landis has lifted the entire concept from a famous episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Only, this time, there’s the added bonus of having our characters forced to fight off the bad guys while watching their plane slowly ripped apart by the bat-rat. Although it isn’t the most original flick because of this, so far it was pulling off what many deemed impossible: a great Max Landis script. Dare I say it, one of my favorite genre pictures of the year.

Unfortunately, Grace does come out of the turret in what amounts to the cinematic equivalent of jumping off a cliff. The downward spiral starts around this time with the reveal of what’s in Maude’s package – a totally unneeded and, frankly, silly plot development – and moves on to one completely ridiculous scene after another. The pacing quickly flies off the rails and the film is no longer able to find the right balance between combat movie and horror ride. It’s astonishing just how out of control and how truly bad the movie gets in the second half. Whatever good feelings I had quickly went out the window, as it were.

It’s like Landis actually took time and effort and then half way through writing decided he was ready to move on and mashed together the rest of the script as fast as he could. I won’t go into specifics because I don’t want to spoil the “fun,” but let me just give you a small taste. If you’re ever writing a movie and think it’s a good idea to have the hero chase down the monster for some good old fashion fisticuffs, put down the typewriter and find a new career.

Until then, save yourself the disappointment of a great first half of a movie utterly destroyed by sloppy writing and unsteady direction in the second. Instead, go watch “Nightmare at 30,000 feet,” the episode of “The Twilight Zone” on which this movie is lifted, and reminiscence about a time when talent was the most important quality someone needed to excel in Hollywood.

You can watch Shadow in the Cloud yourself through Amazon Video.

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