The Bogey Man;s in the Closet!

Rating: 1/10 (18 May 2009)

I am so glad I didn't buy this miserable work but recorded it from TV. At least I can erase the tape. Making a good science-fiction movie is always challenging and only a few such as the producers of Gattaca have succeeded. This particular movie does not even come up to the less than average standard of Sci-fi B films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Why didn't I like it? Basically it was a waste of time for the two fine lead actors Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. The script and lines given them were just awful. Banal doesn't adequately describe them.
A married priest (Gibson) ceases to believe in God and throws away his dog collar after his wife is terribly injured and dies as a result of a traffic accident caused by a neighbour who was had fallen asleep at the wheel of his panel truck. (How the priest becomes a born again Christian seems to be the film's only theme). It does not explain his nastiness to his young son (he also has a cute little daughter). He has a grown up kid brother (Phoenix) who is a former baseball star (don't forget that last part because it's vital for the movie's end). The kid brother has moved into the barn like cottage adjacent to their Pennsylvania corn farm, after the priest's wife dies, so as to keep him company.
The Signs are the several neat circles the kids discover in the cornfield. More of them are contained in -of all things - a Sci-fi novel about alien invaders that the young son is reading. It seems all too obvious that aliens are at work because the local young hooligans are incapable of drawing perfect circles let alone carving them into the corn. The family's pet dog is apparently attacked by an alien and dies. They don't call the vet to attend to the injured dog because, guess what, as is revealed a bit later, the vet is the fellow who fell asleep at the panel truck's wheel.
Nor only is the script banal and the plot very thin and obvious but the scenes just drag on and the movie seems a lot longer than its 108 minutes with not much happening. One only catches sight of an alien bogey man during the last thirty minutes or so. Its first appearance is in a Brazilian newscast that freaks out the priest's brother who is watching the TV. The local alien bogey man later appears in vivo in the priest's family den after the family has boarded up doors and windows (remember that happened also in Hitchcock's The Birds). Indeed, the producers don't seem to have made up their minds as to whether the movies should have been a pure sci-fi or a horror movie. It succeeds in neither genre.
There is a slight twist at the end where their own alien is whacked thanks to some cryptic words the priest's dying wife utters in a flashback as Mel Gibson hovers over her body at the scene of the accident. The twist is actually quite clever and I shan't reveal it for the benefit of those who might like this movie. As in H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and every other Sci-fi tale or movie about alien invaders, they always have a fatal weakness, if you can discover it.
The quality of the movie is not even redeemed by any exceptional cinematographic special effects or lavish period settings and costumes. As the movies is set in 2002, the adults dwelling in the Pennsylvania backwoods are either clad in Wal-Mart blue jeans and chequered shirts or in patrol officer's uniforms. The child and animal actors are good though the child actors also suffer from the poor lines given them, fortunately not the lot of the dogs who only have to bark and snarl at the right moment or the flocks of bird extras who whirl and twirl around when presumably disturbed by the alien presence. The movie might have been partially salvaged by an element of humour, but even that is missing.