Dark Skies Review

Okay, this is my first new movie review of 2013! And how was it? Uh...

Okay, so Dark Skies stars Felicity, a MLB player, a Phantom Menace-Anakin Skywalker look alike, and Generic Horror Movie Kid. They play this suburban family that keeps having weird stuff happen to them, eventually leading to the conclusion that aliens are stalking them. There you have it.

And how was this Insidious rip-off. Yeah, funny that I know its a rip-off in spite of having never seen Insidious (go ahead and hate me all you want). The answer to the aforementioned question is... okay. Let me explain: this movie is 1 hour and 40 minutes long. The first hour and 20 minutes are not good at all. The best way to describe them is narmy, or full of narm.

What is narm you ask? Narm is when something that's supposed to be dramatic or scary (the latter, in this case) is executed so terribly due to bad directing or bad delivery or the fact that it was just silly to begin with (all three in this case, folks) that it becomes unintentionally funny. And believe me you, that happened a lot in this movie. The sheer number of times I laughed, along with my friend and everyone else in the theater laughed is absurd. It got to the point where it became acceptable to start making Mystery Science Theater-esque snarky comments (granted, the fact that most of the audience was teenagers might've had something to do with that) about the absurdity we were watching. And that was more entertaining then the movie at that point. Maybe it didn't help that the last trailer before the movie started was for Scary Movie 5. Yeah, not a good way to set the tone. If they'd stopped with the add for The Last Exorcism Part 2 maybe, but... you get the idea.

It wasn't even really the fault of the actors, either (except the little kid, he was a crap actor). Kari Russel was good in this, she acted like she was trying to give this thing some actual credibility. Josh Hamilton (not the same guy) and the kid from Real Steel were fine, too. The directing and the writing were the biggest problem, especially the writing. It's written and directed by the same guy, and he's a better director. Heck, in terms of set design and visuals, the directing is fine, it's just he made the actors deliver a lot of lines badly. And a lot of the script is just silly. That's why I kept laughing, because a lot of the stuff that he wrote to scare the audience made said audience laugh, and that's the biggest problem the movie has. Narm.

In this narm-fest there are one or two moments that were kind of off-putting, but not really. Not enough to make me stop laughing anyway.

But then we get to the last twenty minutes, the climax, for all intents and purposes, of the movie and it became a horror movie. It was legitimately scary. My hearty rate was up and I wanted to look away but I couldn't bring myself to, which is what I want to happen when I watch a horror movie. The scares were finally done well and not narmy, I was freaked out, I really was. There was a general air of fear going around. The rest of the audience seemed to agree, too, because there was no more MST3K-ing at that point, and I even heard one or two people scream. I don't want to spoil it... but I will say that the main plot points and concepts finally became relevant and came home and... came to fruition, I guess. The ending wasn't perfect though, because at the very end, like in the last two minutes, the movie kind of explained itself in a way that just came off as wicked condescending. And then the very very end happened, and I was freaked out again.

The question is, is it worth $10 dollars to see a movie that's 80% laughably bad and 20% terrifying? Answer: No, its not. I'm actually sort of proud of the fact that I used a movie pass to see this and didn't actually support it with my money. If its on cable or Netflix Instant (which it probably will be in like a month) or MAYBE if you need to see a movie this weekend and you don't think anything else looks good and its a matinee, then fine, go ahead and watch it, you might like it more then I did.

And, I actually had to create a whole new rating for this one. Its between Fun Time-Killer and Avoid Paying To See It. Here you go:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dark Skies might make good background noise.

So, Dark Skies; have you seen it, what did you think of it? Comment below, let me know!