A deliriously demented wartime creature feature clings to cult status with a wing and a prayer

Genre-bending creature features tend to dwell mostly in the realm of low budget VOD rush-jobs that don’t aim to clear a particularly high bar. Depending on who you ask, though, 2020’s Shadow in the Cloud was either a resounding triumph or an ungodly mess.

Despite being Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a stellar 77 percent approval rating from critics, audiences weren’t left so enthused. In fact, a 32 percent average user rating from upwards of a thousand votes indicates that the airborne World War II fantasy with a monstrous twist was one of the most opinion-splitting movies of the pandemic’s early stages.

Sent out into the wilderness in January of 2021 without a hope of succeeding, the deranged hybrid of action, horror, and fantasy’s only chance at longevity was securing cult status, which it may or may not have accomplished. To hammer home its polarizing nature even further, a reflective Reddit thread finds commenters in vociferous disagreement on whether Shadow in the Cloud is trash or treasure.

It might sound like a cop-out, but the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The story sees Chloë Grace Moretz’s pilot transporting top-secret documents, only to discover there’s a malevolent presence trying to bring down her plane. It’s completely and totally off-the-charts insane, but whether that’s a good or bad thing is entirely up to you.

Based on how heated things have been getting on the aforementioned back-and-forth, we’re nowhere near to settling on where exactly Shadow in the Cloud stands in the annals of unabashed cult glory.