Dark Skies over Suburbia.

I watched a film tonight called Dark Skies, which was set in the world of American Dream-style suburbia. Every house in the neighbourhood had at least twenty seven rooms, each one filled with expensive – though largely tasteless – furniture. The neighbourhood had neighbourhood gatherings in which kids of assorted ages jumped into the outdoor swimming pool (a common theme in such films) and the marginally post-pubescent vamp sported her bikini provocatively with the sole intention of driving the marginally post-pubescent boys frustratingly euphoric (also a common theme in such films.) And not to be upstaged in the fun stakes, the grown ups sat around the table eating barbecued dead animal, all wearing their informal-designer ego cloaks, the men discussing the economy while the women concerned themselves with the slightly saltier matter of who in the neighbourhood was canoodling with whom. Meanwhile, the man of the protagonist family (one husband, one wife, two kids) was tearing his guts out because he’d fluffed the interview for a better paid job and he really needed the increased salary to maintain his lifestyle.

(Lifestyle? You call that a lifestyle? It’s at such times that I’m truly glad I was never driven by money and never had any.)

Ah, but then the nightmare begins: The greys are coming. Well, actually, they’re already here, but they’re invisible right up until the end when they appear as stick man puppets silhouetted against the glow-of-indeterminate-source shining through the window. They don’t move or anything, they just stand there doing Nosferatu impersonations. And then the marginally post-pubescent older boy disappears. Oh, good.

‘Why are they picking on us?’ asks the beleaguered suburban wife when she visits the expert on greys who has ‘stopped fighting them now.’

Because you and your study in vacuous values and rampant superficiality are fascinating, madam. Why wouldn’t they pick on you? I would.

As usual, I was rooting for the wrong side.

(And if anybody reading this happens to be an American with a 27-room house in the suburbs… Sorry.)

In short, it was a crap film.

I might tell the story of the two little lambs who had lost their mother tomorrow, if I can be bothered.