Looking for a “safe” movie I could enjoy with the hubba hubba over the weekend that would still give me some horror thrills, I stumbled upon Beyond Skyline, not even knowing it was a sequel. After it was over, we were hyped to see the first film. I’m actually glad we saw the second film first, because they are very different films.
SKYLINE (2010)
Skyline is an intense alien invasion flick for a good portion of its run time.
It stars Eric Balfour, Donald Faison, Brittany Daniel of Club Dread, and even Crystal Reed of Teen Wolf.
A group of friends falls asleep after a party and is awoken by a blinding blue light beaming through the apartment window…that sucks you away if you look at it!
The light is coming from huge, cockroach-like spaceships…that harbor bug-like aliens with tentacles.
This group of friends also has to avoid giant, 2-legged aliens that can somehow spot them wherever they hide in the giant apartment building.
The most suspenseful and scary scenes are the ones in which the group is chased when trying to escape the building. This is actually a pretty frightening film about what would happen if super powerful aliens came to snatch us all and whisk us away to their ship. Eek!
But as the movie reaches its climax, it does detour into a wild ride of alien battling action, with military planes swooping in for a sky chase and the survivors putting up a battle to the death with the aliens. This last minute shift in tone is the perfect segue into the very different sequel.
BEYOND SKYLINE (2017)
I think if I had seen Beyond Skyline first I would have been a bit disappointed in the over-the-top action tone this follow-up takes, so I can see why people might be hard on it and unwilling to just go with it and enjoy it for the fun flick it is. Horror hottie Frank Grillo of The Purge movies (I so want to get all up in his Grillo) stars as the action hero in this epic alien action sequel. It’s like the original Cloverfield meets Pacific Rim.
When the alien invasion hits, Grillo and a small group of people escape through a subway tunnel, where some of them meet an awesomely gruesome ending at the tentacles and the giant vajayjay-like orifice of the smaller walking aliens. The alien models definitely look a bit different despite the simultaneous timeline…the films are supposed to be happening concurrently.
The “sequel” part really hits when the survivors get beamed up into the massive spaceship! Awesome. There’s a very cool crossover with the first film here, but sadly, even though their appearance is brief, the characters from the original film were recast for the sequel.
A suspenseful segment of the film takes place on the ship, but this massive alien outing crash lands back on earth…in Asia! Grillo and friends then team up to fight the aliens in a wild ride of nonstop melee battles and martial arts fights with the smaller aliens.
And it all leads up to the major battles between the giant aliens, which we learn are actually just shells controlled by the smaller aliens inside.
The silly sci-fi fun that ensues is as visually stunning as some of the much more popular sci-fi flicks that come out these days.
