THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN

The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks

THIS MONTH, WE’RE paying tribute to the long-lasting influence of Die Hard.

Thirty-three years of yippeeki-yay, and filmmakers are still pitching ‘Die Hard-in-a…’

Peter Thorwarth’s Blood Red Sky is Die Hard-in-the-sky

with a vampire tiger mom as Bruce Willis. Nadja (Peri Baumeister) takes a transatlantic flight, departing and arriving at night, to get to a clinic that may have a cure for her condition. Ruthless faux-terrorists hijack the plane and Nadja goes off her meds, sprouts fangs, drinks blood, and does her best to save the day… though some of the baddies she kills rise again as monsters. In disaster-movie style, passengers and staff all have their own microstories — the most obvious stereotype, a gay flight attendant (Alexander Scheer), is putting on an act as elaborate as the heroine’s pretend-to-be-human bit — and stages action-in-an-enclosed-space vampire-on-crook and vampire-on-vampire fights with bloody flair.

Similar ingredients — superheroic female lead, perilous flight, monster — are mixed very differently in Roseanne Liang’s outrageously entertaining but also frankly demented Shadow In The Cloud . In World War II, as signalled by a 1980s-style synth score, Maude (Chloë Grace Moretz) joins the all-male, all-sexist-bastard crew of a flying fortress with a super-secret box of something. Just as in that Twilight Zone

episode, the interloper isn’t believed when she tells the rest of the crew that she can see a gremlin ripping vital parts out of the plane. For much of the film, Moretz is confined to the belly-gun turret as if this were a ‘buried alive’ picture, with sound effects and radio chatter conveying how bad things are above her, but the heroine breaks out for a third act of truly outrageous improbability — with the best ride-anexplosion stunt since Die Hard and a lot of danglingfrom-the-fuselage-by-aninjured-arm business — to go one-on-one with the gremlin. CGM blasts enemy aircraft, puts 1940s blokes in their boxes, and perfects her do-not-mess-withmissy expression.

Suspense situations don’t come simpler than David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s race-themed The Boy Behind The Door . Two kids (Lonnie Chavis, Ezra Dewey) are trapped in an old dark isolated house — one to be sold into slavery, the other to be killed. Chavis as Bobby, the ‘disposable’ Black boy, has a shot at escaping but won’t leave his white friend Kevin (Dewey) behind — so he has to go full-on John Mcclane and play hide-and-seek with desperate, creepy characters (Kristin Bauer van Straten makes an impressive main menace). With great work from the young actors and a splendidly ramshackle house of evil, this is the kind of eye-catching thrill machine that lands its makers much bigger gigs.

As Die Hard-in-a-… quickies go, the Die Hard in-a-not-very-large-retail-outlet Rogue Hostage (aka Red Hour) is almost comically economical. Ptsd-suffering war veteran/child protective services officer Tyrese Gibson becomes a — you guessed it — rogue hostage when a backwoods militia type (Chris Backus) launches a raid to get revenge on Tyrese’s estranged politician/ entrepreneur stepdad (John Malkovich). Directed snappily by Jon Keeyes, this is filmmaking in an era of Covid compliance as overqualified supporting actors (Michael Jai White, Luna Lauren Velez, Holly Taylor) practise social distancing in little corners of the film. Malkovich gives a little more than he needs to and Gibson huffs about the place amiably, beating up bad guys.