ORIGINALLY POSTED ON STRAIGHT.COM, NOV. 15, 2010
Two alien-invasion flicks were released in Metro Vancouver last Friday, but Monsters only opened at one theatre while Skyline made it into at least a dozen. Judging by how much the latter film sucks, it should have been the other way around.
As Skyline begins, good guy Jarrod (Joe Perry look-alike Eric Balfour) and his sweet girlfriend, Elaine (Scottie Thompson), fly in to L.A. to visit Jarrod’s suspiciously wealthy buddy Terry (Donald Faison) at his luxury penthouse. In the company of three other stereotypes, they get the party started, but while they’re sleeping it off, meteorlike streams of blue light rain down on Tinseltown
Soon the apartment becomes bathed in bright light, and whenever anyone takes a peek through the ceiling-to-floor blinds, their skin becomes purplish and their eyeballs get all zombiefied. The illumination has a hypnotic attraction, resulting in countless scenes of near-victims being drawn toward it before being grabbed and pulled away just in time.
When that’s not happening, monsters of various sizes, resembling a mishmash of critters from Predator and The Host, attack the building, probing its rooms with tentacles in a direct rip-off of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
The most credible dialogue in Skyline involves people yelling “Run!”, “Go!”, and “Back up!”. Directors Colin and Greg Strause (AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator—Requiem) eschew things like a credible script and decent acting to focus on CGI enactments of hapless apartment dwellers being pulled away by darting tentacles and rammed into slimy alien orifices.
Things get particularly hokey near the end, when Jarrod dashes around on the apartment roof with a firefighter’s axe in one hand until the weapon comes in real handy for releasing Elaine from the unwanted clutches of one overly affectionate tentacle.
And you thought Cloverfield was ridiculous!