Crew
Director/Producer – Aaron Winsal, Screenplay – Tom Joliffe, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – James Cox, Visual Effects Supervisor – Matt Ditko, Visual Effects – Steve Clarke & Paul Knott. Production Company – Jagged Edge Productions.
Cast
Betsy-Blue English (Cindy), Sarah T. Cohen (Becca), May Kelly (Lola), Sarah Alexandra Marks (Yvonne), Eva Burton (Adriana), Ryan Davis (Mike), Matt Baunsgard (Roland), Jack Ilco (Vince), Daniel Jordan (Don), Chrissie Wunna (Karen)
Plot
It is Cindy’s twenty-first birthday. To surprise her, her father Mike has rented a private plane to fly her and four of her girlfriends to St. Lorenzo for the weekend. Soon after they take off, the plane enters a storm. Becca is certain that she sees a creature out in the clouds. The plane is then grabbed by a giant tentacular monster. The monster’s tentacles enter the craft and devour the pilot, leaving Cindy, who barely knows how to fly a plane, having to figure out how to escape the monster’s clutches and make a landing.
Sky Monster was a production from the Jagged Edge production company of prolific British genre producer/director Scott Jeffrey/Scott Chambers (although Chambers himself is not credited on the film). This has been the sole credit of any type that director Aaron Winsal has had. It is unusual for a filmmaker to have no industry credits before leaping into a feature film, leading one to suspect that Winsal is a pseudonym.
There was a spate of planeboard thrillers that emerged in the late 1990s/early 2000s with the likes of Turbulence (1997), Red Eye (2005), Flightplan (2006) and others, before the genre was parodied with Snakes on a Plane (2006). The latter led to series of deliberately ridiculous entries such as The Asylum’s Snakes on a Train (2006), Swarm (2007) with ants on a plane, 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.
The 2020s has seen a renewed spate of such titles – the standout Blood Red Sky (2022) with vampires on a plane, Monster on a Plane (2024) and Jagged Edge’s Spiders on a Plane (2024). Sky Monster comes closest to the famous Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1963), later remade as a segment of Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), where William Shatner couldn’t be certain there was a gremlin out on the wing of the plane. There have been other works influenced by Nightmare at 20,000 Feet such as Altitude (2010), a work that Sky Monster resembles even more, 7500, Shadow in the Cloud (2020) and Row 19 (2021).
Sky Monster could be Nightmare at 20,000 Feet or Altitude where the gremlin on the wing becomes a hulking Lovecraftian, octopus-like being in the clouds that physically grabs the plane in its tentacles. There is a certain amount of the Psychological Ambiguity that Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is founded in with the scenes of Sarah T. Cohen not sure if she sees something out there as others dismiss what she saw, but this is soon forgotten as we get very real manifestations of the sky monster in exterior shots and others of its tentacles invading the plane.
The film itself is nothing much beyond its title premise. You can tell all there is to it within a glance at the poster or at least from the point the plane takes off – five party girls in a plane with a giant octopus monster outside threatening them. The rest of Sky Monster never progresses much beyond a series of scenes with the girls in the plane being threatened by the monster outside with occasional cutaways to people in the control tower urgently trying to get through to them.
Trailer here