REVIEW: Dark Skies (2013)


Dark Skies: UV

Worst piece of garbage I have seen in theaters in a long time. From the genius that brought you Priest and Legion: A middle class family of four is harassed by three invisible aliens who are “studying” them. For an unexplained reason, inducing minor and major terror is a part of alien protocol, so they do everything from playing mysterious pranks to implanting brain transmitters. The family, of course does some “research” and gets wise to what’s happening, so then it’s (anti-climactic) confrontation time.

So many reasons to hate this film.

First of all: no scares! There are not even jump-scares much less anything gruesome or twisted. There are barely any attempts at fright; the few “scary” moments are laughable and saturated with Boogeyman-esque CGI that seriously looks like XBOX-360 graphics. Forget about gore/nudity; this turd is a calculated PG-13.

Secondly: ANYTHING entertaining is in the trailer IN ITS ENTIRETY. You know how there is a 2 second snippet of the kid having a grand mal seizure? Well, he has a 2 second long seizure in the film. Everything from the effeminate dad’s mouth gaping to the alien brooding over the child’s bed, the stuff you see in the trailer is all the “interesting” stuff you can expect to see in the film. J Jonah Jameson (the “wise elder” of the film) never makes a single joke or has a Jameson style outburst. He just sadly front-loads exposition, explaining brain transmitters before walking off-set and collecting a paycheck.

Also, they did something I NEVER thought anyone would have the balls to do in a film. You know the old horror movie cop out where things start to get crazy and then a character wakes up and the audience is like “oh, it was just a dream!”? Well, they did that THREE TIMES. But that’s not the worst part; the third time was A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM! The character woke up, more crazy shit started happening, so they WOKE UP AGAIN! There are more layers here than Inception and In the Mouth of Madness put together. If you played a drinking game where you took a shot for every time a dream sequence was broken, you would have to go to the hospital.

In a climax that would give M Night Shyamalan a seizure, the parents find out that the aliens had been in their lives all along. But by this time, you’ll probably be unconscious from bashing your head into the wall over and over and over and over.

Roger Ebert puts it best when he says the movie ends in a way “as if designed specifically to enrage the hardy viewers who actually make it all the way to the end.”

4 thoughts on “REVIEW: Dark Skies (2013)

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