Watched
"Dark Skies" on PPV this evening. mrs. trapeze was in the mood for a scary movie.
It's about a family living in the suburbs who begin to experience an escalating series of unusual events. Seems that they are being visited by some malevolent aliens...probably bent on abducting one of their two kids. The family makes all of the usual horror movie mistakes including my two favorites: 1)walking around the house at night and for some reason not turning on the lights...every-single-time...and 2) splitting up when it's obvious to anyone and everyone that it makes more sense to stay together.
The movie is reminiscent of
"Signs" except that you are never really sure of what is real and what is being imagined by the family members. There are several scenes in which the characters "wake up" and you realize that what you have been looking at for the last minute or so is a hallucination. Or not. It's hard to tell sometimes. It's enough to drive you nuts as you watch this film wondering if what you are seeing is real or imagined or whatever.
So here are a few things that irritated the heck out of me: 1) The first incident is where the mother wakes up, wanders downstairs (in the dark) and finds that a whole bunch of stuff from the refrigerator has been arranged into some kind of precarious sculpture on the table...and the sliding glass door is open. Cause for alarm? It would be for me. Not these people. They assume it's one of their two kids. Who were demonstrably asleep at the time. 2) Yet another break in and this time every single picture frame in the house has been emptied of photos. Their reaction? Pay the alarm company bill so that they can turn the alarm system on. Me? I'm gonna be camping out downstairs with a shotgun and all of the lights turned on, indoors and out. Not them, though. They don't have a gun. Instead they spend a small fortune installing CCV cameras all over the house so that they can "catch" the bad guys in the act. And guess what? It doesn't work. Every time the aliens show up the cameras mysteriously get all freaked out. 3) A whole sh*tload of birds inexplicably ram into the house. They show a bunch of guys in bunny suits picking up the dead birds as if they are radioactive or something...they say they are worried about "bird flu." Yeah, sure. The bird experts seem totally uninterested and unimpressed that this happened. Meanwhile the parents start to interrogate their kids as if they somehow made all those birds commit suicide. Ridiculous. 4) Somewhere toward the end of the film after countless inexplicable things have happened (every single family member loses consciousness at one point or another...usually in broad daylight in front of witnesses...and sleepwalk, bleed uncontrollably from random body orifices, self mutilate themselves and other such nonsense and NO ONE seems to think that maybe there is a problem. 5) They go and see the local fruitcake UFOlogist and his sage advice is, "You're f**ked. The aliens are gonna screw you, take one of your kids and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it. And BTW, they have already put mind control sh*t in your head...look here's mine." So that was a big help. 6) They get this ferocious ass German Shepherd dog and it barks its ass off when the aliens show up for the big finish and then that's it. It's like the dog then got bored with the whole thing and either went to sleep or maybe outside to take a dump. The dog turns out to be absolutely useless. Maybe the aliens ate the dog. Who knows? 7) Dad waits downstairs (after telling everyone to split up) and shoots into blinding white light when the boarded up front door gets knocked in. As soon as the door hits the floor he starts blasting away (with the shotgun he just bought and has no idea how to operate...the Joe Biden school of firearms) at the light and...gasp...that's it. We have zero idea as to whether or not he has hit anything or anyone. The aliens somehow completely evade dumbass dad and manage to get upstairs to terrorize mom and the kids.
The movie is absolutely chock full of stupid stuff like this. It goes on and on and on. Side note: After a while you get tired of the "story" and start noticing (thanks to hi-def) that mom (Keri Russell) has several unattractive bumps on her face, one right in the middle of her upper lip. Yikes. That's actually more creepy than the movie, itself.
There were one or two "startling" moments in the film but the increase in tension and/or suspense that you know the director is desperately trying to achieve comes off as contrived rather than natural. The director/writer (same person) has very obviously borrowed from a lot of other (better) material...."Signs" is perhaps the most obvious source material but so is "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and just about any other alien abduction movie that you can think of.
The ending is disappointing but not unexpected after you witness the unconvincing build up to the big finale. You get to the end and you are thinking, "That's it?...that's what I suffered through for an hour and a half?" So, you get to sit through a bunch of crap, have your intelligence insulted numerous times and there is zero payoff.
On balance, I liked "Signs" better, one of M. Night Shyamalan's less horrid films. In fact, "Signs" got a 75% at the Rotten Tomatoes site whereas "Dark Skies" got a paltry 38%. But I guess I could say that I probably find just about any alien abduction movie better than this one.