Dark Skies - Film Review

*CAUTION: This review contains spoilers for Dark Skies. If you haven't seen it and wish to do so, proceed with caution.*

Horror films are a strange breed in contemporary cinema. The idea of short-sharp shock to the system that give people a super-shot of adrenaline is as old as film itself - indeed, the first film ever shown in public was of a train filmed so it came towards the audience, which terrified the people of the time.

They are also relatively straight forward to make, which explains why there's almost always several horror films in the cinema at once. But after a while there's an issue of horror films blending into one.

Certain cliches pop up time after time, particularly in films that have a run of build-up franchises like Saw and Final Destination.

More recently, the Paranormal Activity film behemoth with it's own repetetive visual language has stormed the world of horror. Films with creeping up, possession of kids and 'found video footage' from static security cameras are the new hot ticket, free for excessive parodying by the underwhelming Scary Movie franchise.

But it's also free for the producers, buoyed by such success, to go on and attempt slightly-differing recreations of this format.

Lo and behold, the producers of both this have their new recreation. Dark Skies is an attempt to marry the Paranormal Activity blueprint to a conspiracy-based covert alien invasion thing, similar to the Silence in the 2011 series of Doctor Who.

The story is set early on. We're introduced to the Barrett family - an implausibly glamorous middle class family with Daniel, a struggling architect dad, Lacy, a moderately-succesful estate agent mum and two sons, Jesse and Sam.

Early on there's the slightly strange way to unsettle when all the vegetables are eaten from their fridge - a plot point that never actually gets explained. This is then followed up with an unusual art installation made of all the cans and food packages, and all the photos from the living room are stolen.

The police think the kids did it, while the security system company are confused. Daniel wants to ignore it because his financial issues are giving him enough grief. However things get more inexplicable.

The first is the more bizarre point of Sammy pissing himself and screaming in the middle of a park, which oddly recalls a South Park parody of Ghost Hunters. Soon enough, 800 birds suicide-dive into their house in a cliche move of animals behaving weird. Sammy then runs outside in the middle of the night after being potentially abducted by a ghostly grey individual, with no recollection of how he moved. Then Lacy is affected when she freezes, bashes her head against a glass door, blacks out and gets suspended.

Trouble is, this is all cliche. It all feels that, although the cast is doing well to perform the script, it just feels lazy.

Daniel duly engages in a sort-of avalanche nosebleed, just as Lacy discovers the potential alien intent. This is the point where the film tries to move from sub-standard horror cliche into a more sci-fi conspiracy mood, with references to the Alaskan HAARP program, simultaneous bird deaths, children's drawings of tall grey men and the like.

Around this point the Paranormal Activity section is thrown in, with a video camera feed that frequently flickers.

It also turns into the "they're coming up with this bullshit to distract them from neglicence rumours" storyline. Outsiders believe they're abusing the children, with Sammy covered in purple marks and Jesse covered in a bizarre red crop-circle like painting after he is hospitalised with a BB gun wound/possession.

Of course, you're not going to help by beating up the kids' friends and duly getting punched in the face by the kid's dad. But that doesn't stop Daniel beating up Jessie's friend Ratner, and duly getting floored by Ratner's dad.

After that night sees Sammy sport black holes for eyes and video camera footage reveals dark figures standing over the beds, we're duly introduced to the conspiracy specialist.

Edwin Pollard, who looks a little like Rupert Murdoch, explains the presence of aliens that have secretly taken over the world and regularly adbuct children on a mysterious level. He informs them that they are bugs in the alien system and that there is nothing to do to escape them apart from keeping Sammy, who they think is the target.

They get a dog, a gun and chipboard for windows, and try to stick together but ultimately it's too late as they're hunted down. The greys at this point are fairly freaky, but not spectacularly so.

A prequisite twist comes at the point abduction, before a final move away, and a final contact with the abducted kid ends the film on 97 minutes, which is probably fair enough.

Ultimately the film has good actors and some mildly scary moments, but it seems to be a cliche horror script bolted and remade with a conspiracy concept that has been done better in other films. There's nothing extremely terrible about it all and for what it is it's an alright job but it just feels a bit cliche and unremarkable. There are certainly better films out there to see.

2.5/5