Firstly, a quick confession; I'm a real soft touch when it comes to a good movie poster, a cool DVD cover, or back-cover teaser descriptions. I've sat down in many a theatre or shelled out for many a DVD on the basis of this alone. A strong concept with plenty of potential, and I'm in. So with Altitude, it had me at 'Fear is in the air'. My hit-rate for finding good movies this way is about 50-50. But I sometimes get as much pleasure from watching a bad movie as a good one. And so to Altitude, which lands firmly in this former category. But pleasure was something sadly lacking in taking this flight.
The description on the back of the DVD case hinted at a malevolent force, picking off teens, as teens usually are in these films, but in the unique setting of a light plane; a nice twist on the usual claustrophobic settings. A supernatural killer on the loose at 10,000 feet... cool, I thought. But from this intriguing take-off position, the film crashes and burns in its most important areas; a coherent plot and interesting characters. Five friends fly a twin-prop to a concert 'because the drive is bad', or some other rubbish reason - so we have our set-up. The five tick all the cliché boxes for the teen victim demographic; the jock, the nerd, the sensitive artist, the prom queen and the bookworm. And despite these stereotypes bucking the usual trends slightly (the arrogant jock turns out to be a coward and a drunk, the artist brave and resourceful), the characters are so weakly sketched out that we do not care for anyone as things start to go wrong, even our spunky heroine pilot, Sara (who has achieved somewhere in the region of 100 hours worth of flying time whilst keeping this a secret from her dad, and also learnt to fly because her mum was killed in an air crash. As you do.)
So after establishing such hateful and idiotic people are our main protagonists, it's left to the plot get us off the ground. Initially, it's a bit like Twilight Zone: The Movie, where a nervous John Lithgow sees an evil imp trashing the wing of his passenger jet but can get no-one to believe him. But a closer look at that 1983 movie reveals an even more blatant lift. The Joe Dante-directed third segment, where an evil child who can create his own reality around him, trapping his family in a murderous world where he has to be kept happy and entertained for fear of violent and bloody retribution.
So no external entity of malevolence, just an insecure man-child with a violent id (Forbidden Planet?); subconsciously brought to the fore by the heroine's plan to leave to go to university and his repressed anger at the death of his parents (yes, in the same air crash that killed Sara's mother).
Throw in a prescient comic book (Heroes, anyone), a giant flying squid and a climactic face- off between good and 'evil' (is he? I still don't know who we were supposed to be rooting for) that is resolved by the biggest cliché of them all, and all that back-sleeve potential finally runs out of fuel.
It's such a shame, because I thought the direction from Kaare Andrews was solid and some clever scenes, with the lightning flashes making the screaming faces look like skulls, even had me considering the possibility everyone was already dead. No such luck.
I'd like to think I've learnt my lesson after paying full price for this DVD. But I probably haven't....
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