Kaare Andrews (noted comics artist on Spider-Man and The X-Men and The Incredible Hulk) has a new Lovecraftian horror film out soon, going straight to DVD.

The premise of Altitude is quite interesting. It’s a green-screened indie film from Canada, set in a light plane — a constrained setting which one can only hope the director’s undoubted visual flair for composition has made the best of. The trailer looks good, in that respect, and the CGI looks competent. So one can only hope the story (by Paul A. Birkett, of Escape Velocity, Mindstorm, and Crash Landing) is strong, the plot has some intelligent twists, and the acting/dialogue isn’t dire. Birkett’s films get between one and two stars on IMDB, though, so I’m not hopeful.

/Spoilers ahead/

The film is set in a small light plane, flown by a rookie teen pilot taking four cute friends for a spin. They go up and of course they hit a storm. They start to run out fuel. Then they panic. Then it gets really bad…

Sounds similar to the Twilight Zone “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Storm, Plane, Madness, Lovecraftian Sky Beast.

Altitude has been shown at the San Diego ComicCon without reviews, and it’s possibly a bad sign that it’s going straight to DVD (26th October 2010) — although maybe that’s just because they don’t want to waste money on the marketing needed to herd the mouth-breathing popcorn-heads into the cinemas. Straight-to-DVD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dire — remember what Spielberg did with just a big truck and a TV-movie budget in Duel, for instance.

The official trailer (spoilers alert: it seems to lay out most of the film)…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWbM3r2W2I&fs=1&start=8;&hl=en_US]