The greys were hot in the 90s. Hollywood made the Travis Walton abduction into the feature film “Fire in the Sky,” the mini-series “Intruders” fucked me up with that slo-mo scene of the girl running after a boy in the wood who turns out to be a hybrid, “Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County” showed what can happen if a bunch of greys surround a family home, “The X-Files” ruled television and copies like “Dark Skies” and “The Shadow Men” tried to create their own mythos. Then, obviously, was that blue dude in the music video of the Eiffel 65 song “Blue.”
NBC wanted a piece of the action and made the TV film “Visitors of the Night.” It tells the story of Judith English and her teenage daughter, who I think might be 32 years-old, Katie. Judith is experiencing flashbacks of her childhood whenever she sees a bright light, and Katie is actively being abducted. This generational abduction scenario would be explored later in Spielberg’s mini-series “Taken.” Of course, it isn’t just abductions going on here. Katie has an incredible immune system, is ambidextrous and understands relativity. I know a hybrid when I see one. Damn indigo children.
Alien abductions have been a hot topic since Betty and Barnie Hill in the 60s, but there are remarkably few movies about the event. “Visitors of the Night” kind of encapsulates why. It’s always the same story. A person sees lights, gets flashbacks, experiences missing time, has weird memories, gets hypnotized, remembers the abduction… That abduction scene is always the money shot. It’s what we came to see. The problem is that all the rest is mostly nothing. It’s just people living their lives experiencing flashes of weirdness. That’s hard to make interesting so we end up with a boring film with, hopefully, at least one memorable scene.
That scene in “Visitors of the Night” isn’t as visceral as the gross-out abduction in “Fire in the Sky” but it’s effective thanks to an amazing work by the special effects people. Those greys are just standing there, really, but they look fantastic. They are practical animatronics that go way beyond what you would expect from a cheap TV-film.
The film was written by Michael J. Murray, who mostly does made-for-TV Christmas movies, and he did some research. In “real” alien lore, the greys are highly intelligent but they have no emotions. They want to create hybrids that have the emotional capabilities of humans with the intelligence of them. These are just facts. That’s the plot here.
Now, is it worth watching? Yeah, I liked it. Markie Post is the mom, Stephen McHattie is the ex-husband/dad and Dale Midkiff, aka Louis Creed from “Pet Sematary,” is the sexy cop. The acting is good enough to keep you entertained while you wait for those bitchin’ aliens.
For the OG “the greys are good” film obviously watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” for the OG “alien abduct people” film watch James Earl Jones as Barney Hill in “The UFO Incident,” and for a solid horror take, watch the 2013 film “Dark Skies.”
