Night Skies

Night Skies follows five friends, including A.J. Cook’s Lilly, George Stults’ Matt, and Gwendoline Yeo’s June, as they’re confronted with increasingly sinister forces after their RV breaks down in the middle of a desolate forest, where they also encounter a shady ex-soldier (Jason Connery’s Richard). There’s little worth recommending in Night Skies aside from a fairly effective final 15 minutes, which transpires aboard an alien ship, with the majority of the film devoted to the padded-out misadventures of these uniformly unpleasant characters. Screenwriter Eric Miller doesn’t give the viewer a single reason to care about any of these people, and exacerbates the problem by emphasizing laughably overwrought instances of dialogue. This is clearly the sort of story that demands the big-budget Hollywood treatment, as evidenced by the egregiously low-rent production values and all-around vibe of needlessness (ie the movie can’t help but come off as a second-rate riff on Fire in the Sky).

*1/2 out of ****