The main problem with the movie ‘Night Skies’ is that there isn’t enough movie to fill out a movie.  ‘Night Skies’ probably would have worked just fine an episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ or something along those veins, but as a movie it simply has too much dead space and emptiness to give it a good recommendation.

The film starts with some stock footage of Senator John McCain pretending to give a damn about some mysterious lights that appeared over the southwest.  Of course Senator McCain knows, just as I do, that there is no such thing as UFO’s or extra terrestrials, or anything like that and that we are in this huge ass universe all by our lonesome.  Now that we have established this undeniable fact, lets peer in on our travelers who have acquired an RV to go from somewhere in Arizona to Las Vegas.  But as they tend to do in movies like these, our team of randy twenty somethings choose to take the back roads.  Nothing good ever happens on back roads my friends, nothing at all.  In an example of the nothingness that is padded into ‘Night Skies’, the first twenty minutes or so is our team driving in the RV and having lame conversations about not much of anything with each other.  Then they see the weird lights in the sky and they stare at those for about five minutes.  I should also mention that during a bump in the road, one of the kitchen knives fell out from the cupboard in the RV to the floor, and is showed in close up to, so it must mean something’s gonna happen with that knife, huh?

Sure enough, everybody’s looking at the lights including Matt (George Stults) who’s driving the van, down the windy twisty road.  As such, he doesn’t see the flares setup by Richard (Jason Connery) whose truck has broke down.  The RV careens out control, runs

into a tree, and they all fall down.  Remember that knife?  Well, Joe (Joseph Sikora) went and done fell on it and now he’s bleeding to death.  In a scene right out of real life, everyone has determined that they need to get Joe to a hospital, everybody’s car is broke, and they can’t get a cell signal.  So they all stand around for a couple of minutes, saying nothing, looking confused, having absolutely no solution.  Like I said, real life.  But in a movie, standing around for a couple of minutes looking confused kind of sucks.  To complicate matters, there are bug eyed aliens about and they have abduction and anal probing on their minds, and this where ‘Night Skies’ turns into a spooky, I see you, No I Don’t, monster movie.

Another example of the empty space is when the Matt character is looking for his girlfriend Lilly (A. J. Cook) who he thinks is in the woods.  So for three and a half minutes (I timed it) he’s seeing things, then he’s not seeing things, he hears things, then he doesn’t here things, then with his back turned the camera rushes up real fast along with the rising score and we have to assume the aliens finally got his ass.  One down, five to go… Well, no because two minutes later, there he goes.  And we did all of that stuff before because?  There's also a couple of long chase scenes where the camera is chasing our actors in circles for far too long, but this thing had to reach a certain running time to qualify as a feature, so there you go.

On the plus side, the aliens, though the stand-by bug-eyed type, looked good and despite the low budget, the film didn’t particularly feel or look low budget, despite the limited locations and sets.  Jason Connery, who was about as badly miscast in any movie ever when they made him the super hero in the gawdawful ‘Lightspeed’, proves that it was the producers fault for putting him in that garbage more so than his acting ability because he’s not so bad in this one.  But that’s about all I can do for you though.

Hey, it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve seen, and it had a moment here and there.  I probably would have been edited down a bit, but that would have probably made the movie about 36 minutes long.  Thus, to end it on a positive, we will say that ‘Night Skies’ is one hell of a 36 minute movie, if it weren’t for those pesky extra fifty minutes of padded lameness.