By Roger Moore


FILM: Dark Skies
CAST: Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J K Simmons
DIRECTION: Scott Stewart

The standard-issue alien abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the living dead in Dark Skies.
It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.
Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those of us who didn’t heed the warnings of “Signs”.
Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites - she’s a real estate agent, he’s an unemployed architect - who suddenly have weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen re-arranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage, long-term unemployment and a mortgage in arrears. Dark Skies is about how they and their confused kids handle all this.
Not very well, as you might expect.
Lacy (Russell) hears things and sees things. She’s at a loss to understand what took everything out of their kitchen cabinets and parked these things in precarious stacks, all the way to the ceiling. Daniel (Hamilton) is less credulous.
He’s fibbing to her about his job interviews, and she’s not telling him everything that’s going on at home, how little Sammy (Kaden Rockett) keeps having nightmares about “The Sand Man”.
The lies come out and the marriage earns its ugliest test when they come face to face with the impossible. The movie sinks or swims not on our belief that this is happening to them, but on the players’ beliefs, and neither adult gets frantic or worked up enough to be convincing.
At the very least, the first time Lacy spies a spindly alien from “Signs” standing over her child’s bed, her freak-out should be epic. Both actors play muted shock, not panic.
And panic was called for.
As episodes pile up - catatonic fits, mass bird collisions with their house, strange bruising on their kids (Dakota Goyo is Jesse, the oldest) that has the neighbours sure they’re nut-job child-abusers, you’d expect a mania to set in. Daniel and Lacy can only manage confusion, and solutions borrowed from Paranormal Activity (surveillance cameras), Night of the Living Dead (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie (Internet searches, where The Truth, or at least the conspiracy, is out there).
That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an “expert” (J K Simmons) on “visitations” whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacy and Daniel seem beaten before they start.
Visual effects man turned writer-director Scott Stewart is very good at managing tension, and the script doles out the requisite shocks at decent intervals.
But what’s missing is that insidious empathy, the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer should and would share - if only we’d been given more reason to care or a surer sense that they do.- MCT

Haunted-family saga

FILM: The Condemned
CAST: Cristina Rodlo, René Monclova, Luz Odilea Font, Axel Anderson
DIRECTION: Roberto Busó-García

Roberto Busó-García’s haunted-family saga begins with the return of a dying doctor and his righteous grown daughter (Cristina Rodlo) to the devastated village where his practice began decades earlier.
Needless to say, there are ghosts present, both literal and historical, and the dark, guilty secret for which the spirits want retribution turns out to be exactly what you think it’ll be.
The filmmaker throws in a strangely irrelevant twist before he’s through, but despite a lavish dose of gothic style (and the occasional inspired flourish, as when surveillance monitors are overcome with home movies of dead children), The Condemned’s trek toward absolution is pretty familiar.
The Condemned often makes you think you’re watching an art-film pastiche. Unfortunately, Busó-García offers no proof that he’s playing with genre.
Busó-García has said that The Condemned was partly inspired by a scandal plucked from the life of Dr Cornelius P Rhoads, an American pathologist and cancer researcher who some suspect conducted ghastly experiments on patients while working in Puerto Rico in the 1930s.
Dr Rhoads’s real crime may have been writing a letter while drunk in which he disparaged Puerto Ricans and claimed to have experimented on patients and killed eight. He later insisted that he had been joking and was cleared after an investigation, but the letter prompted the American Association for Cancer Research to remove his name from one of its awards. - WS

Uncommon plot


FILM: A Common Man
CAST: Ben Kingsley, Ben Cross, Jerome de Silva
DIRECTION: Chandran Rutnam

Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley stars as a seemingly average citizen who plants five powerful bombs in different locations around a city. He then returns to a rooftop “control centre” where he sits in front of a tiny television and a series of mobile phones, and informs the police chief (Ben Cross) that they have until six sharp to comply with his demand to release four terrorists from prison, or the bombs will detonate.
He lets the chief know there’s one bomb in the police station, and even tells them how to disarm it, but there are still four left: the three in public places, and one other bomb in an undisclosed location.
In an urban landscape already gripped by fear, what could be the real motive behind “common man’s” ultimate plan?
Side characters, such as a cop’s wife and a news reporter, are either so unimportant as to be little more than window dressing, or not removed enough from the central story to function as supporting material.
The film is a remake of the Indian thriller A Wednesday.- WS

(DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)