Night Skies (2006/UFOs)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: C-     Feature: D

 

 

In the 1970s, there was a U.F.O. craze that no film has documented well and no imitator of the new X-Files era of such programs have come close to capturing.  Roy Knyrim’s Night Skies (2005) tries to build a fictional Horror tale around a 1997 incident where mysterious lights were seen in the sky and never identified.  Again, this happens around Las Vegas, but this 84 minutes-long torture test imagines killer aliens instead of U.S. Government air experiments and is really, really, really bad.

 

Eric Miller’s script is awful, the acting is lame and the narrative laughably pointless.  I knew we were in trouble when footage of Senator John McCain is shown talking about the lights in a very, very cheap attempt to add credibility to this wreck of a project.  At first, it looks like Hills Have Eyes lite, then it gets much worse.  Jason Connery is the lead and Michael Dorn surfaces for a bit and both are wasted along with the unknown cast and the time of the viewer.  Skip this one!

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image originates on digital video and looks bad, one of the poorest for such a production we have seen lately.  It is so lame that the stock NTSC video does not look much worse.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix has no real surrounds and is front-heavy and weak.  The combination is annoying even for such a short production.  The only extras are trailers for other Sony releases.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo