good back-story, and good acting

A Disappointing Continuation

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

"Night Skies" is equally divided between a chatty, boring, first half, and a somewhat intriguing second half. The low budget is not that obvious as some of the effects are pretty good. The character development in the first half is strained, and the acting well below average. The second half is more forgiving since screaming and running through the woods is less challenging than trying to remember lines. Nevertheless, when you have nothing more than someone's repressed memories for a script, the finale is acceptable. I didn't hate it, but this film is far inferior to another low budget sci-fi "Night Feeders", which is award material compared to "Night Skies" - MERK

Night Skies(2007) is a great movie with spooky moments definitely not for the faint hearted. On the DVD disk you can SEE more of Richard and Lily on the UFO and HEAR more gunshot and screams. And if you watch closely in the scene where Richard is in the forest after shooting the other guy, you can see a real freaky alien! Yipes! I flinched after later glimpsing the alien again when Richard got back on the RV. Totally scary as we see Lily running for her life(or maybe it was one of the other girls ?) and trying to make it till morning after they get abducted and Richie has to kill her. Yipes! The cops at the end of the film find Richie scared as hell! Definitely not to miss! 9.98/10! Hire it out or buy it today!

This may contain a spoiler or two, but I will try to avoid that.This movie is supposedly based on the regression-therapy records of someone who experienced the "Phoenix Lights" on March 13, 1997. If you have read the book "Communion" by Whitley Strieber then the plot will seem very familiar to you. Also if you have read the narratives from people who claim to have had encounters with aliens, the story might seem familiar to you. So much for the complaints about the story being predictable.If the statement about where the story comes from is true, then that would also explain why the dialogue and the story don't seem all that engaging. This is a true story. Ask yourself this: If someone made a movie of 3-4 hours out of your life, how interesting would it be? How snappy would your "lines" sound to an audience? Would the people watching "your story" think the events were "predictable?" Would they think the dialogue was "unimaginative?" For my money, the dialogue was believable as was the storyline. If this is a true story, I would expect it to be mundane, with ordinary conversation instead of scintillating conversation full of artful badinage. This is supposed to be true life, folks, not some screenwriter's fantasy! Given the above paragraph, I would say the acting was true-to-life. How many people do you know that are not all that great to be around? How many people do you meet everyday that are really engaging and you want to know more about them? Think about it. If this is a true story, then the actors managed to be come off being ordinary and uninteresting characters, just like you might expect. True life is not "Ocean's Eleven!" I thought the special effects toward the end were very good. The aliens looked like most of the descriptions that you will find in the book "Communion," mentioned at the first part of this review. From that standpoint, they were believable. Real life just does not always look as good as Hollywood movies.If this movie was indeed based on the source claimed, then it delivered exactly what I would have expected it to deliver: an incoherent story with a lot of holes and unanswered questions in it.

Night Skies starts as Matt (George Stults) & his fiancé Lilly (A.J. Cook) along with his younger sister Molly (Ashley Peldon) plus two married friends Joe (Joseph Sikora) & June (Gwendoline Yeo) are driving across the Arizona desert in an attempt to get to Las Vegas, all seems fine until they notice some strange lights in the night sky flying in formation. However much to Matt's cost looking at lights in the sky & driving a large motor home don't mix & he loses control, almost hits another truck on the road & puts the motor home into a tree. In the aftermath of the accident it comes to light that Joe now has a huge kitchen knife stuck in his back & there seems to no way to get him to hospital, as the night draws on it becomes apparent that they are not alone as they are stalked & taken by alien beings...Directed by Roy Knyrim I was rather surprised by Night Skies, sure it ain't Alien (1979) in the excitement department & it reminds heavily of an X-Files (1993 - 2003) episode which were airing over 10 years prior to this being made but as a stand alone film I found it quite impressive. The sci-fi/horror orientated script by Eric Miller which takes itself extremely seriously is apparently based on true events that happened in Arizona during 1997, living in the UK I really don't have a clue about these events, & is based the usual witness statements & the like. To be fair it's sort of predictable up to a point & it only goes as far as to dramatise one night seemingly based on one guy's recollection so it doesn't offer any of it's own answers up & it just ends abrupt without really trying to say anything about what happened, but then again I suppose it's just trying to relay the facts of the case & wants to let us, the audience, decide for ourselves. To be fair during the first 20 minutes of Night Skies nothing happens, it just introduces the character's, not that much happens after either but at least the film has now put them in position where the last 30 minutes are actually terrific, the stalking of the group by the aliens & what they finally do with them is pretty cool. The character's are OK as is the dialogue & if it wasn't for the coma inducing first half Night Skies could have a great film, as it is I'll say it's a good one.Director Knyrim does a great job here, there's a decent atmosphere & the alien attack at the end is really good even if it's a bit rushed at times. The special effect are excellent & are very impressive, the aliens themselves look somewhat stereotypical with very thin pale bodies, elongated heads with bulbous black eyes & spindly fingers & most of the time they're shot in partial or complete shadow until the very end in they're spaceship where you can appreciate the excellent effects work. The very organic looking interior of the spaceship is cool with strands of what looks like melted cheese & slime hanging everywhere like huge cheesy spider webs! There's some gore, that knife in Joe's back looks painful as there are plenty of close-ups with blood spurting from the wound, someone is shot & there's some decent blood splatter.Technically Night Skies is excellent, the cinematography is good even though it may be a bit bright considering the situation the film is trying to portray. The acting was pretty good, Sean Connery's son Jason gets abducted & experimented on by aliens. I wonder if his dad has seen Night Skies? If he has at least Jason can say something like 'well dad it could have been worse at least I didn't appear in The Avengers'....Night Skies surprised me as I thought it was going to low budget crap, while the first half is a snooze-fest it picks up for an excellent climax with some highly impressive special effects which wouldn't look out of place in your local theatre & it's got Sean Connery's son in it, enough said. Certainly nothing original but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would all the same.