Crew
Director/Screenplay/Visual Effects Supervisor – Ezra Tsegaye, Producer – Christopher Cornelson, Photography – Kristina Schippling & Ezra Tsegaye, Music – Simone Cilio & Rüdiger Gleisberg, Miniature Effects – Berton Pierce, Creature Design – Chris Creatures Filmeffects (Designer – Chris Kunzman), Makeup Effects – Shapeshifters FX (Supervisor – Klaus Grüßner), Production Design – Roman Frechen. Production Company – Riot City Entertainment/Cornelson Films.
Cast
Eva Habermann (Natalie), Robin Czerny (Ben), Philippe Brenninkmeyer (Captain John Pillow), Dieter Landuris (Professor Singh), Fred Aaron Blake (Helmut), Nicolas Artajo (Nico Torrez), Steven Preisner (Steward Thomas), Anthony Straeger (Sky Marshall), Isabel Dornheim (Melanie), Ana Singer (Alina), Isa River (Ezra), Sabine Heinen (Mia), Armin Moallem (Mikey), Lea Müller (Lea), Anja Karminski (Uli), Errol Trotman-Harewood (Detective Manado), Natalia Witmer (Detective Anna)
Plot
A plane boards at Mermaid Lagoon Island on a flight to Hamburg. Professor Singh brings a suitcase on board and is very nervous about its correct storage. Two local police detectives try to stop the plane taking off but are unable to do so. As the flight gets underway, turbulence disturbs the luggage in the hold and frees what is in the professor’s suitcase. This turns out to be a vicious creature that attacks everybody on board while releasing pheromones that create an illusion that the victims are seeing someone they desire.
Monster on a Plane was the second feature film for German director Ezra Tsegaye. Tesgaye had been working as a storyboard artist since the mid-2000s and had made a number of short films. He made his feature-length directorial debut with the horror film Skin Creepers (2018).
The early 2000s brought a spate of airplane thrillers with the likes of Turbulence (1997), Red Eye (2005), Flightplan (2006), Non-Stop (2014) and Mayday (2015). The horror genre leaped on board this with the tongue-in-cheek Snakes on a Plane (2006). Several other filmmakers offered similar wacky vehicular collusions – The Asylum’s Snakes on a Train (2006), Swarm (2007) with ants on a plane, Silent Venom (2009) with snakes on a submarine, zombies on a plane in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007), a ghost story on a plane with 7500 (2014) and Flight 666 (2021), and Lost in the Pacific (2016) with mutant cats on a plane. A couple of years before this, Germany had made the quite good vampires on a plane film Blood Red Sky (2021) and you suspect that Monster on a Plane was conceived in a similar vein. Mindedly, in the airplane thriller genre Germany had also made the ridiculous Skybound (2017), not to mention the bizarrely entertaining Sky Sharks (2020).
What promptly propels Monster in a Plane into Bad Movie territory is the dialogue. This consists of German actors who are voicing their dialogue in English where all of them speak with distinctive German accents. Why the film didn’t dub the voices is a mystery. Or for that matter I am not sure why we couldn’t have had subtitled German. Ezra Tsegaye aims for naturalistic sounding English dialogue and a sense of humour but in the actor’s mouths that falls completely ridiculous – a declaration of passion: “Judy, we are going to do it like baboons in the jungle,” being the particularly hilarious standout. This is not helped by some incredibly bad acting, particularly from Fred Aaron Blake as a wanted killer aboard the plane who seems enunciate everything he says by straining every muscle of his face at the same as he talks.
Monster in a Plane does have the benefit of some gory deaths, which are quite accomplished in terms of effects. Things however fall down when it comes to the stiff immobile puppets being used for the monsters, which look exactly like some of bad copies of Gremlins (1984) that circulated in the late 1980s, in particular the Krites from Critters (1986) and sequels. The full-size monster looks like a miniature Godzilla.
Trailer here