No One Will Save You

My Grey Heaven

No One Will Save You
Directed by Brian Duffield
USA 2023
Star Thrower Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

Just a quick shout out to a movie from a couple of years ago called No One Will Save You and, also a bit of a warning because, in order to discuss this one properly, I think it’s necessary to talk about what happens at the end (most of the rest of the spoilers in here are just stuff you will figure out from the trailer). Also, I found out one of my comparisons I’m going to make, after I watched this and read the trivia section on the IMDB... well it turns out that Stephen King tweeted out the exact same connection to a specific episode of a specific TV show that had been in my mind when I was looking at this one. So glad I’m on the same page as everyone else here.

This is a movie about a young woman called Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) who lives alone in her late parents large house, slightly remotely on the edge of a forest, a short bike or car ride from her local town (which she visits as little as possible). She is despised by a good deal of the population of the town for something which has happened in her past some ten or more years earlier. Something which Brynn has to live with every day.

And then, one night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears something downstairs. It’s a home invasion but, as she sneaks around trying to see who it is... she soon realises the question is not who but what’ is it? Which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is an alien. And not just any alien, this is obviously based on the greys (or Zeta Reticulans) of popular, modern UFO folklore (and don’t get me started... I gave up researching these guys years ago because of too many sleepless nights). That first night becomes a fight for survival but, survive Brynn does, after accidentally managing to kill said alien.

However, when she goes into town the next day, she finds signs that she’s not the only one who has been visited in the night. Indeed, not only does she change her mind about reporting it because of the reception she gets at the police station, but she’s chased by two humans who are obviously alien/human hybrids. And the rest of the film is about the second night, when more aliens come for her (and the rest of the local population).

Now I’ll get to that spoilery ending in a minute but, the film made me think of two specific sci-fi/horror tales of yesteryear. One of them is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, based on the way aliens take control of humans with a living seed creature vomited from their mouths (in this case) into their victims. But the other thing was (and this is the thing Stephen King clocked too), the similarity to one of my top five episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically The Invaders, which has a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith. That episode has a cast of one (Agnes Moorehead) and depicts a woman who is victim to a similar home invasion from teeny, tiny creatures. I won’t give the twist of that episode away (which is a humdinger) but, in order to make that twist work, there is no dialogue in the episode at all and it’s all set in the woman’s home.

Well, No One Wil Save You is definitely cut from the same cloth. The whole thing is practically wordless (other than a source song and some alien vocal sounds, there are only five words spoken throughout the whole film) and, asides from a few forest and town scenes, the majority takes place on Brynn’s property.

And it’s a well made suspenseful film, it has to be said. You will feel for the lead as she battles, with far inferior means, to stay out of the clutches of the aliens and, despite the revelations of what she did in the past, she’ll probably have your total sympathy (and that’s kind of the point in terms of leading to the ending of the movie too). And the greys themselves can be pretty terrifying, not just a one trick pony as they come in a variety of versions of increasing scariness. So there’s a definite feeling of unease as you watch Brynn fight for her life.

And so we come to the end... don’t read further unless you want to know.

By the end of the movie I felt kinda shortchanged by the conclusion... for all of thirty seconds... until I realised that this was a pretty good ending. When the aliens probe Brynn’s mind and discover how she’s repented for her accidental crime and had to live with the unforgiving towns folk, they spare her from being a human hybrid. Instead, with the planet now populated with human/alien hybrids, Brynn gets to live with them in her home town, teaching them how to be the best part of her human race, giving her a far easier and happier existence than when the Earth was populated by her own species. It’s kinda like what might have happened if the main protagonist of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had let himself be reborn as an alien pod person, living in harmony (of a kind) with his fellow pod people... instead of what happened at the end of that movie. Here, Brynn has found her calling, continuing to live her life collecting doll houses for her diorama (where she watches her model townsfolk in a similar way to how the aliens hover in their flying saucers and monitor their new world) and teaching her new friends how to dance.

And that’s me done with that. No One Will Save You has a perfect ending for a pretty suspenseful film. Not the happy ending you might have wanted but, certainly a happy ending that Brynn deserved. And who needs humans anyway... horrible creatures. This one is definitely worth a watch, as far as I’m concerned.

Dark Skies

Dark Grey

Dark Skies
USA 2013
Directed by Scott Stewart
Playing at cinemas now.

Non-warning: 
Any spoilers in here are those which are already in the trailer. 

It was well over twenty years ago that I first heard of Whitley Streiber in something other than the context of his early career as a horror writer. I read a report, I think online, about him having been seen going around the area he lived in and spending a small fortune buying all kinds of alarm equipment and firearms etc to make his home as unbreachable as he could to any kind of hostile invaders. The article took a slightly patronising tone, reminded people that he’d just written the “autobiographical” novel Communion, and metaphorically patting him on the arm as if to say, “There, there. We believe you.”

The thing is, and the thing that stuck in my mind when I read that small snippet of an article, was that, well why would you go out of your way spending all that money and taking all that time to fix up and install all these different devices, if you didn’t at least believe something was out to get you?

So I read the book and saw the movie and, frankly, what I read in the book chilled me to the marrow. And so, a few years before TV shows like The X Files and, um, Dark Skies, popularised this kind of stuff big time, I started doing some research in my spare time on the subject myself. I got the librarians at the place where I worked to get out inter-library loans on various of the more respected accounts of the phenomenon of... well...alien abduction, and began to really read up on it.

About the same time, a British guy named Nick Pope was working for the Ministry Of Defence and was assigned the task of investigating various UFO related reports which had piled up over the years and ascertaining if any of them had any interest or, indeed, posed a threat to the military. My understanding is that Pope didn’t believe in such hogwash and went at it with a very cynical attitude. The attitude didn’t last too long though because he found that a small percentage of the things he investigated really didn’t have any explanation, from what I gather, other than what he was trying to debunk, and he resigned and the MOD shut the project down. He carries on investigatng, somewhat less cynically, in a private capacity today, from what I can gather.

And, again, around the same time, someone came to work at the same place as me for a while and one of his previous jobs had been air traffic control. He “believed” totally and said after the kinds of things that you routinely see and get reported in that job, you have to sign the official secrets act.

So I carried on reading and two things came out of my personal research into extraterrestrial visitors.

One of the things I noticed is that the people who firmly believe this stuff and investigate it do tend to be the most cynical people going. They distrust everything but solid evidence and, sometimes, that evidence is there to be found (and ignored or covered up by any kind of government sanctioned body).

Secondly, I believed this stuff so much, because the cases made from various methods of research were so airtight, to be honest, that I had about three years of sleepless nights (that’s okay, I was younger and could handle that... but it was fear that kept me awake). I mostly, deliberately stay away from this kind of stuff now. I believe the matching accounts of groups of people on crowded streets (mayors, police officers and passers by) who all collectively witnessed single incidents of the most amazing and unbelievable kind and all independently reported these things... as much as I believe the aliens can be categorised and identified by most people involved in these encounters, even those who have come from small tribes cut off from the rest of the planet and who are “totally” unpolluted by anything happening in Western culture. They all draw the same drawings.

So yeah, I leave that stuff alone now because, frankly, I’m getting on now and I need my sleep.

And that’s exactly why competently put together movies like this one called Dark Skies (which has no ties with the similarly themed TV show from a couple of decades ago) work so well on me.

Now I saw a trailer for this movie and it looked pretty much like a standard haunted house meets Greys scare movie, Greys being a specific and most widely seen alien type (if you believe that kind of thing, but that’s exactly why they’re mined so much in modern popular culture). Well I have to say, this movie does pretty much everything as advertised. There are no twists, just scary visitations from our little grey friends (Zeta Reticulans, for the record) interwoven with a few other phenomena to spice up the scare factor and neatly summarised by the “Van-Helsing-but-only-in-an-advisory-capacity” alien researcher played so credibly by the always watchable J.K. Simmons.

The whole film is full of standard scare tactics and cliché ridden horror tropes but, that’s okay, because it is really all quite well put together and it certainly had my heart beating faster (but then again, as I have taken time to explain here, I’m prone to that kind of extra-terrestrial implied threat anyway). The music, by composer Joseph Bishara, is well put together and delivers all the modern atonal nightmarish quality you’d need in a score like this, sci-fi’d up with a bit of subsonic synthesizery stuff which kicks in when required. The direction and shot design are all pretty much adequate/competent and the performances are all fine too.

The writing is a bit patchwork in its sources, to be truthful, and the obvious attempt at misdirecting you away from the actual target of the extraterrestrial antagonists is both obvious and quickly guessed, so the ending is of no real surprise and it really could have done without the “beat you over the head with stuff you were more than aware of at the time” flashbacks in the little epilogue sequence... although the very last 30 seconds or so was a nice touch.

But, all said and done, the film is still quite scary (it veers from various research accounts at times to quite deliberately justify why it is trying to scare the audience at one point) and certainly, although nowhere near the best film made on this kind of subject material, it does still manage to be quite grippng and suspensful througout a fair few of the set pieces, despite the number of familiar “horror moments” which are piled on. So, yeah, if you like this kind of stuff then you certainly shouldn’t find yourself too dissapointed in this one. It’s a scary night out at the pictures.

And if you find yourself dweling on the dubious nature of the story and the presence of a malevalent extra terrestrial force on earth which "first" appeared on the scene during the age of science, ask yourself this... Why are elves, pixies, faeries and whatever other small creatures always popping up in various countries’ cultural mythologies?

And why do churches have gargoyles?