Skyline

"Don't look up"?!?  What kind of tag line is that for a movie about UFOs attacking Earth?  Right away, if the title Skyline didn't clue you in, that tag line is slap to the back of the head that lets you know that this movie will suck.  "Skyline"???  Is that the best they could come up with?  Just to prove how worthless whoever titled this film is, I'm going list roll a few better options off the top of my head:

• Blue F'n Lights - it's not a J.J. Abrams film, but it still fits
• Star Whores - probably a porno title, but since nobody could have actually liked the script, both terms feel appropriate...
• Underwhelming FX: The Movie - as an Illinois native, it pains me to criticize a special effects company out of Waukegan, but...why not?  They're so far north, they might as well be Wisconsinites
• Eric Balfour vs. The Universe - he needs to be stopped, and our world is clearly not up to the task
• Aliens Rape LA - my personal favorite

It's not like the term "skyline" has any importance to the plot, or (as far as I can recall) is even mentioned in the script.  Whatever, I'm over it.  There is one other thing I have to point out about this movie poster.  Look at the two guys on the poster.  It looks like they're getting ready for some action; one of them has a gun and appears to be sneaking up on the spaceship, and the other looks poised and ready to go.  This shot is taken directly from the film, and I promise you that the scene is nowhere near as cool as the poster might lead you to believe.  For starters, the guy on the left, who looks like he might be wearing a Kevlar vest or something, is just wearing a jumpsuit.  The other guy is holding a video camera.  They're not getting ready for action, they're getting ready to crap their pants.

Still photo of Donald Faison, mid-pants-crapping

All right, I guess  should get this over with.  Jarrod (Eric Balfour)and his girlfriend, Elaine (Scottie Thompson), fly out to Los Angeles to help celebrate the birthday of Jarrod's bestest buddy, Terry (Donald Faison).  The pair go way back, which is a nicer way of saying that they don't really see each other too much any more.  Terry has become a big time musician or actor or something along those lines.  I don't recall any specifics about his career, but he has money, a swingin' pad, a sexy girlfriend (Brittany Daniel) and a sexy secretary (Crystal Reed).  After a night of partying and some personal revelations, this fascinating look into group relationships is rudely interrupted by aliens.

...making everything earlier in the film completely irrelevant.

These aren't your ordinary aliens, though.  Well, they kind of are.  There are huge spaceships that appear to be disintegrating entire chunks of the city and sucking people into their core.  There are ground troops that vary capturing/eating people with smashing them into raspberry jam.  Neither of these sound atypical of movie aliens, but wait until you get a load of The Light.

Walk toward the light.  Pleeeeeease.  End this quickly.

The alien ships use a blue light (very similar, but far less subtle than the Blue F'n Lights of Super 8) to lure stupid humans to their doom.  Seriously.  The light goes on, people get mesmerized by it, and then they evaporate.  Or something.  Oh, and your skin and eyes get all blotchy.  That's probably important.  But it might not be.  So this assortment of civilians winds up being improbably important in humanity's war on alien scum, right?  Actually, no.  These people spend most of the movie hanging out in a penthouse, watching other people fighting the aliens.  And that's how the movie goes.

About par for the action scenes in this film.

This is a bad movie.  I wasn't expecting a whole lot from it, but I enjoyed the last effort from Colin and Greg Strouse (Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem) and thought this would make for some stupid fun.  There was plenty of stupid in Skyline, but precious little fun.

It starts with the acting.  I assumed that Donald Faison would be the star of the movie, since he has had the most successful (television) career in the cast and because I saw his interview on Attack of the Show several months ago.  I hate sitcoms, so I was never a fan of Scrubs, but he seems like a decent guy and I was interested in seeing him carry a sci-fi movie.  Well, he's only in about thirty minutes.  Looks like I put all my expectation eggs in the wrong basket.  Instead, the dreadful Eric Balfour is the main character.  It's not that he's a bad actor (although he is), it's that he brings down every movie I see him in.  Here, his motivations are asinine at best, his opinions are stupid, and his character is pretty unsympathetic.  Oh, and he hasn't quite figured out how to act convincingly against special effects.  Or people, for that matter.  Brittany Daniel and Scottie Thompson were a little better, but only because the story didn't focus as much on them.  Both women were unreasonably bitchy at extremely inappropriate times (like, you know, when aliens invade our planet), and sometimes their over-serious reactions to things were bafflingly funny.  David Zayas has a surprisingly large role for a character that isn't featured in the first third of the film.  He wasn't great, but compared to the rest of the cast, he looked like Lawrence freaking Olivier.

Special effects mean you don't have to act as much, right?

The ultimate problem with Skyline isn't the acting or the directing, even though both are awful.  The main problem is that the writing is idiotic.  This film follows a group of people who spend most of the film hiding in an apartment building.  From aliens.  Aliens that are destroying Los Angeles.  So, instead of focusing on people that are, you know, fighting aliens (like the not terrible Battle: Los Angeles), we focus on people who are hiding.  That seems like a poor choice.  And a boring one, at that.  I'm not saying that you can't make a movie like this, but it should focus a lot more on the characters and have someone that the audience can like.  In other words, it shouldn't try to be a showcase for special effects.  It's not too much to ask, is it?  Skyline provides an unsympathetic group of characters, has them act like jerks, and I'm supposed to give a shit about them?  Sorry, that's not going to happen.

I would have been fine with Skyline's terrible acting and directing if the movie had been fun.  It's not.  It's the worst alien invasion movie ever.  Well, okay, Alien Predators was a worse film, but Skyline is way less fun because nothing ever seems to happen in the damn movie.  To give you an idea of how dull this film is, it is a key plot point for the group of people to work together and put blinds over a window; they are not successful.  Just thinking about that scene is making me mad.  Thank goodness they chose not to give it a proper ending and left the door open for a sequel.  Ugh.  The only thing keeping this from zero stars is how hard I laughed during Donald Faison's last scene, and that was only because I assumed he was the main character.

Club Dread (Unrated)

The comedy spoof movie sub-genre has always been hit and miss.  Even genre kingpins like Mel Brooks, Jim Abrahams, and the Zucker brothers have had embarrassing missteps (Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Mafia! spring to mind).  Nowadays, the Wayans family has essentially taken over the spoof market; every spoof that has hit theaters in the past ten years has either had a Wayans in it or a writer/director from a Wayans project involved with it.  I have major issues with this trend, partially because I think the Wayans spoofs are lazy, obvious and insulting to my intelligence, and partly because watching there is scientific evidence that they cause massive brain hemorrhages.  My biggest issue with these newer spoofs is that they are mean-spirited.  They don't seem to like the things that they are spoofing, so it becomes an exercise in taunting the spoof subject instead of giving the audience a few laughs and some wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments.

Club Dread is, without a doubt in my mind, the best movie spoof in the past ten years.  There are a few ways that this film separates itself from the pack, and these differences add up quickly to make an important...um...difference.  First and foremost, this is not a traditional spoof. 

Just try to name another movie with watermelon-pretzel sex

This is a genuine blend of a stupid comedy and a slasher movie.  There is a quality horror movie here; Broken Lizard just inserted comedic characters into a horror plot.  That this spoof actually has a plot is another key difference.  Most spoofs use their plot as a loose timetable for them to arrange skits or visual gags.  This movie doesn't work like that.  You won't see any actors impersonating Tom Cruise or making any pop culture references to Paris Hilton here.  Instead, the jokes are almost always character- or plot-based.  Perhaps the most important difference between this spoof and the many others on the market today is the respect (or, at least, fondness) Broken Lizard clearly has for the horror genre.  The quality of the kills is pretty decent, showing some gore and some originality.  That makes this more of a comedic tribute to the slasher pics of the 1970s and 80s than an outright spoof.

Which is good, because the world doesn't need more "Trapped in the Closet" jokes

The movie follows a fairly traditional plot outline.  A group of moderately attractive young singles finds themselves in an isolated location with a mysterious killer on the loose.  The singles in this movie are the Broken Lizard troupe: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske.  Of course, they aren't terribly attractive, so they get some help from Brittany Daniel and Jordan Ladd. 

"I'm helping"

The isolated location is the island pleasure resort of Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton), a less-successful contemporary of Jimmy Buffett.  The resort has a few hundred twenty-somethings running around, swimming, drinking and having promiscuous sex.  The killer murders the island's staff (which includes the Broken Lizard guys) with a machete and leaves obscure Coconut Pete references as clues for the staff to decode.  As a horror movie, this isn't a great plot, but I've certainly seen worse.  As a comedic plot, there are many opportunities for the cast to mistakenly suspect characters of being the killer, and the resort setting is an easy mark for party and sex jokes.  All in all, the plot is more than strong enough to support the comedic aspects of the film, with a decent horror framing device.

With that disclaimer in place, how good is this movie?  It's pretty awesome.  The mediocre slasher movie elements jump out at you first.  Creative deaths?  Check --- my favorite is when the masked killer puts on a costume (think about that) to participate in a life-sized, alcohol-fueled Pac-Man game.  Gratuitous nudity?  Double check! 

Erotic penis statue?  Triple Check!

It's the subtle comedy that makes this one a winner, though.  Of course, there are big dumb gags (there's good usage of man-gina and a lot of stoner jokes), but the best are the little ones.  When Kevin Heffernan shows up as the replacement masseur for a six-foot Swedish babe, he only points out that he's 6'1".  Because that's why the guys on the island are upset.  And then there is Steve Lemme's pronunciation of "Penelope" as "Peen-elope."  It's so stupid, but this mistake is never pointed out by any characters in the movie, so he just keeps saying "Peen-elope" the entire time.  Or, around the campfire, Paul Soter tells the tale of Phil Colletti, who massacred his friends with a machete and to this day he is known as Machete...no, not Colletti.  Machete Phil, even though it doesn't rhyme.  These clever little half jokes are all over the script and I laugh at almost every one.

Admittedly, most of the masseur gags aren't quite half-jokes

Part of these successful moments is due to the actors' timing, but the rest is due to good direction; Chandrasekhar is a good comedic director, knowing how to milk even kinda funny moments for all they are worth.  He's lucky to have some solid supporting actors, though.  Bill Paxton is awesome as Coconut Pete; his nonverbal acting is top notch and he really does come across as a stoned, has-been rocker when he speaks.  The lyrics and song titles for Coconut Pete songs are so good that Jimmy Buffett even played Coconut Pete songs on his tour that summer. 

"Ponytails and Cocktails" is dangerously on-the-nose as a Buffet spoof

M.C. Gainey has some great lines as the resident tough guy on the island and Samm Levine has apparently progressed from playing a general nerd in Freaks and Geeks to playing a sexually aggressive nerd here.  The bulk of the work, though, falls on the shoulders of the Broken Lizard guys.  This time around, I think that Paul Soter as the DJ/drug dealer has the best not-quite-jokes while Steve Lemme is probably the funniest as the sex-crazed Nicaraguan dive instructor.  Kevin Heffernan is okay as the masseur, but he plays the hero and doesn't get to be as randomly fantastic as he was in Super Troopers.  Erik Stolhanske, though, looks like he enjoys his role as the Fun Police, enforcing free drinks with a Super-Soaker, when necessary.

That's a Super-Soaker.  Probably.

This movie is not flawless, of course.  This marriage between horror and comedy leaves moments where one genre is being sacrificed for the other.  It's not a huge problem for me, mind you, but I understand that argument.  Probably the worst aspect of this movie is the acting of Jay Chandrasekhar.  The man did a pretty good job of directing here, but (according to the commentary) the group decided to give him an annoying accent and goofy hairpiece to help offset his tendency to get stressed when filming.  I'm sure that Broken Lizard laughs at his scenes, but viewers are left on the outside of that inside joke.  Seriously, I wish they had just left him out of the movie entirely.  The ending can be annoying for people looking for a more traditional horror experience, but I've always felt in was in-line with the general feel of Club Dread.  It's stupid and plays on a horror cliche, but it's still pretty funny.

Another horror cliche: watching people watch things

Maybe the key to liking this movie is feeling like you're in on the joke.  If you're walking in to Club Dread expecting a traditional slasher movie, you'll be disappointed.  If you're looking for another straight-up comedy, like Super Troopers, you'll probably still be disappointed.  But if you're in the mood for something different and reasonably clever/stupid/gory, there aren't many better options out there.