Watch Skinwalker Ranch For Free

Really Surprised!

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Please don't spend money on this.

A lot of fun.

Deciding to hold a Found Footage (FF) day to kick off my viewing of the Paranormal Activity series,I started looking for a third FF title.Seeing Kim Newman give the flick a pretty good review,I was pleased to spot the movie in a local DVD shop,which led to paying a visit to the ranch.The plot:After getting reports of a child being abducted by aliens,the Modern Defense Enterprises (MDE) are sent to investigate.Placing cameras round the ranch,the MDE soon start gathering paranormal footage.As they try to figure out how to deal with the entity,the group discover that they are not the first gang from the MDE to have been sent to the ranch. View on the film:Working on what is likely a pretty tight budget,co-writers/(along with Murphy Michaels/Ken Bretschneider & Adam Ohler) directors Steve Berg and Devin McGinn do rather well at getting the most out of their special effects,with a blue "digital" tint giving the alien and paranormal animals a crisp, eerie glow. Settling down on the ranch,the writers gradually build up the supernatural horror,flying from something moving in the background,to a ruthless alien invasion. Locating the paranormal in a Found Footage format,the writers give everyone an intro to set their role in the investigation. Disappointingly,the writers use the intros to set an oddly calm mood which bolts down any chance of horrific tension invading,as the skinwalker walks on the ranch.

Let's get this out of the way first: I love found-footage movies and I love alien-themed movies. A combination that generated like... Only one great movie, a couple of good ones, and the rest (they're not so many by the way and I wish there were more and better made ones) is composed of mediocre movies - if you are a fan of the genre. Otherwise what I refer to as mediocre you may prefer to call "a steaming pile of trash". So if "alien-stuff motif + found-footage / documentary" does not sound appealing to you, you can stop reading this right now - your time will be better applied to something else.If, however, the motif sounded interesting, I still don't have the best of news. As the title of this review already spoiled, Skinwalker Ranch for me fit right in the third rank - the mediocre movies. I don't recommend watching it in any other scenario than completely alone and in a complete dark environment. This will maximize the tension and the fear factor of the movie and make it worth watching.The CGI is so-so, the plot has a fair share of clichés and it's nothing innovative. I have the feeling that they stuffed a bunch of different "tension-makers" that did not fit very well in the same plot, but at the same time I wonder if the movie would be any better with these plot elements trimmed out. I did not consider this to be a waste of my time, I watched under the right conditions and got pretty tense at some parts. But it is far from the best movie I've seen in this genre. Watch it "at your own risk".

Although the found footage genre has been overdone lately, that doesn't mean you should automatically dismiss a movie when you see it's filmed that way. Found footage is great when IT'S DONE CORRECTLY. That is the case during the first half of Skinwalker Ranch, which made me jump a few times. However, the second half, especially the end, was disappointing and predictable. Also, it really doesn't add anything original to the alien abduction sub-genre. It's just another typical easily forgettable alien abduction film. Better than The Fourth Kind, but nowhere near as good as Dark Skies (which you should see if you like these kind of movies).

Let me begin by saying that I love horror movies, even the cheap ones. I seriously admire low budget films as long as their ambitious and well written. This film on the other hand is none of that. The screenwriters had no clear sense of direction for this film. Its painfully obvious that whatever direction they initially had became tangled with too many ideas from other successful films similar to its genre. This film is basically a hodgepodge of the found footage genre mixed with aliens and the supernatural. Imagine trying to mix Paranormal Activity, the Blair Witch Project, and Signs to form a coherent narrative but failing in every aspect. The characters in this film were poorly written and completely one dimensional. You feel nothing for these characters when trouble started to brew. The suspenseful monuments were weak and the ending was extremely unsatisfying. Let me stress EXTREMELY UNSATISFYING. I truly feel as though I've wasted my life watching this movie. I would really love to know the story behind this film. How could a director mess up a found footage flick this bad. Please do yourself the favor and avoid this film like the plague.