Night Skies (2007)

There is nothing like a pregnant woman to tickle an alien's curiosity. This is the most important thing I'd learned from this movie. And they perform free abortions."The following events in which ugly bug-eyed aliens harass people for no apparent reason are based on 100% factual reports. Everything that occurs in this movie is so incredibly and definitely true that we can't begin to explain just how amazingly true it is. What you are about to see may bore you somewhat, but please stick with us, because we do have some neat 118-dollar special effects in store for you in the grand finale, right after the uneventful dull first hour." Oh no, not again. Can't they just admit it's all make-believe hooey like most other films do? By starting off with these moronic claims these movies actually shoot themselves in the foot, making it even more easy for me to hate them. Did Spielberg lie to us about "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" being a true story? No. And yet that movie was great. The pretense is unnecessary.Senator McCain making a casual remark about some "unexplained lights in the sky in Arizona", is that best you could do, movie? Well, that proves it! They exist!The biggest problem with anal-probes (or in this movie's case, nasal probes) isn't that they hurt a lot or that you don't get paid by aliens for being their unwilling guinea-pig subject. It is the fact that they are so SHORT. Why do I mean by that? Well, when these daft alien-abduction based-on-"fact" movies are written, there is so little time dedicated to the actual abductions because of the speed with which everything happens with the kidnapped humans. As a result we always have too much padding in these films.Ditto NS. It takes ages for this movie to finally get alien with us. Until that happens, NS takes its sweet time, introducing the dull characters in annoyingly pointless detail, making sure we don't miss anything – including even every visit to the toilet. You could give me an exam on these people and I would know the answers, all of them, down to the colour of socks they wear. What I would not be able to answer in this hypothetical quiz though is how the hell a kitchen knife managed to pierce a man's back, the entire 20+ centimeters, in a minor van collision. I really couldn't. A person's back isn't exactly soft like butter; you actually do have to utilize some measure of well-concentrated force to get a knife to go that deep. (Not that I speak from personal experience, shame on those of you who even thought of it.)I can certainly see the motives aliens would have for spending years (optimistic estimate) traveling all the way to our Solar System, only to engage in a childish game of hide-and-seek with a bunch of moronic young people. That makes a lot of sense, as usual. What were they really doing here, I wonder sometimes.In the end, Jason Connery, making his dad Sean truly proud by appearing in this UFOnic masterpiece, finds himself wrapped in bundles of cheap coloured styrofoam. He finds the blond, sees that she has been probed, her fetus aborted, and then SHOOTS her. (Is he a Catholic?) He hadn't thought of actually SAVING her?"The aliens you have witnessed in the past 90 minutes turned out to all be members of the Intergalactic Mike Myers Fan Club. They had come to Earth to honour their hero by impersonating him. On this annual club meeting the decision had fallen to do a re-enactment of "Halloween IV". Thank you for viewing our fact-based movie, and we hope very much that you enjoyed all of our aliens. We'd spent 103 dollars on the effects (we lied in the epilogue, sorry) so we cross our fingers it was worth the money and all our combined effort. None of the scenes that you've just witnessed were inspired by any of our 48 viewings of FIRE IN THE SKY."On a serious note, the movie REALLY shoots itself in the foot during the prologue:"McCain's requests for an official investigation into the Phoenix Lights (catchy name) were denied by the military… these lights can still be seen in Arizona's skies". Well, duuuuh. Add 2 and 2 together, Einsteins. Those were and are military test craft of some sort. Duuuuuuh."Senator McCain has seen this movie and said it stinks."

Funny, I've never heard of the events on the night of March 13th 1997. Something like this would be global news, and on every station in the world right? I was been seven at the time, and would probably remember my parents talking about it if it happened. Obviously, it did happen though. What we see in Night Skies however, probably did not, but it makes for a reasonably solid, extra terrestrial flick coming out of the same category as indie films like Communion and Fire in the Sky.Four kids are taking an RV trip through Arizona, it is the dead of night, and they are lost. Then they have a little accident when they almost collide with a trucker who has stalled out on the side of the road. The RV crashes, and one of them ends up with a near fatal would. As it happens, the guy on the side of the road, is an Ex-army doctor who attempts to help, but without a hospital, the kid could die. They are stuck in the middle of noweher with no cell signal, and there is something lurking about. When they attempt to go looking for help, the s**t hits the fan. How does it do so, in one word...Abduction. Night Skies plays out like a tighter more suspenseful version of Fire in the Sky. The story is an appropriate length, and even if you find it a bit slow, it has a pretty good pay off, also similar to Fire in the Sky, but ten fold more gooey. I would say that Night Skies satisfied me. Whether you believe or not, doesn't really matter. I'm always interested to see how different filmmakers do their take on an Alien Abduction. This one (though shallow) is pretty good.

The movie has almost no relation to the story on which it is allegedly based. For more than an hour, it is nothing more than a would-be horror flick, with all the usual clichés of the genre. The aliens are nothing more than a gimmick, as much as I liked them. Come to think of it, they are the best actors in the movie! Otherwise, the acting is bad, characters are unbelievable, FX range from OK to cheap and obvious, and the overall feeling is of an overblown student film. I watched it at night, a time when I simply love cheap, trashy flicks and my mind yearns for ultra low production values and plenty of T&A, if possible. I'm talking about But even with my very lenient and liberal quality criterions for that kind of films, this movie is a flop on every aspect. If there were some T's, at least there was some redeeming points. Otherwise, a total waste of time.

It's hard to become emotionally involved with characters in a movie when they don't even like each other. You have to wonder why a group of people would even take a vacation together when they get along so poorly. Then when the alien trouble starts you hardly care about most of them. Beyond that you have to get back to an often asked question. Why would beings from a superior planet come all this way to terrorize a bunch of lost tourists. If you are really bored at 2 in the morning and you can't sleep and it's free on TV then maybe. If you have to pay to rent it - save your money.