Skyline (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Colin Strause, Greg Strause. Starring Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Donald Faison.
The 'B' movie makes its loathsome return.
A group of excessively pretty no-name actors are partying at an LA penthouse when an alien invasion begins. The creatures' weapon of choice is an eerie blue light that makes everyone break out in varicose veins. Big, unsightly varicose veins! They must be stopped.
Or, failing that, everyone can just run around screaming for a while-the option taken by Skyline and its characters. The movie amounts to a long series of moments in which a door/curtain/gate is opened and a monster jumps out. Then the running, and the screaming.
This might have had a little bit of shock value if the monsters were actually scary, but they lumber around clumsily on the brightly-lit ground or zigzag through the air like a child playing with toy airplanes. And the movie plays its hand far too early: after a three-story gorilla monster crushes a car somewhere within the first thirty minutes, there isn't anything new left to see.
The professional-level special effects stand out from the cheap quality of everything else about the film, but an over-reliance on CGI is apparent. Actors are clearly wrestling with air when they should have at least been given some cheesy rubber tentacles to work with.
But what pushes Skyline dangerously close to the "abysmal" category is its lazy cliffhanger ending. As a rule, you can't leave the audience wanting more if we didn't want what you were showing in the first place.
From its pre-title teaser to its "oh-we're-out-of-time" ending, Skyline looks and feels exactly like a rejected episode of The Outer Limits. It seems baffling that anyone would fund this movie until you learn that it earned back its bargain-basement $10 million budget on opening weekend.
I'm sure there have been worse alien invasion movies. I just haven't seen them.
Rated PG-13 for deaths of non-ethnic minorities.
2 out of 5
Yogi Bear (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Eric Brevig. Starring Dan Aykroyd, Justin Timberlake, Tom Cavanagh.
Dan Aykroyd cashes his paycheque and Justin Timberlake makes for a weirdly good Boo-Boo in this forgettable live action/CGI update of a bad 60s cartoon.
There's a temptation to call these kinds of movies things like "a crime against our childhood memories," but that argument breaks down when, as in the case of Yogi Bear, the original cartoon was already godawful. As far as that goes, Yogi Bear the movie is a faithful adaptation.
The story, the usual business about saving Jellystone Park from commercial loggers, is hardly worth the effort of summarizing. It's the kind of script you can imagine being hammered out in an afternoon-by competent writers, certainly, but without an ounce of creativity or care involved in the process. Yogi doesn't even maul anyone.
This is not the abomination Marmaduke was. It is, however, every bit as lazy and mediocre as you would expect a movie called Yogi Bear made in 2010 to be.
There is no value in this film for children or anyone else, but if for an hour or two it keeps the kids from clawing the furniture or chasing cars or whatever it is kids do, then it's probably harmless.
Rated PG for endorsing theft.
2.5 out of 5 Skyline should not have been made
