Since the dawn of film-time, aliens have really only been viewed in three situations, first ET as a lovable turd in the film ET who while wandering round the place made a boy ill somehow, dressed up as Mother Teresa while being sat in a bicycle basket, then proceeds to piss off home leaving the family he stayed with a huge phone bill.

The second would be as most aliens on Star Trek, Star Wars and anything else with Star in the bloody title, where they are basically humans with bits of plastic sellotaped to their heads. They laugh, they learn, and they do naughty using their knees or whatever. We love them.

The third lot of alien-funkiness seem to be the kind where aliens are hell bent on destroying human kind by any means possible. More often than not, it’s never made clear why, aside from the fact that Hollywood thinks it makes for great film.

For all we know, It’s like the aliens were just sitting on their sofa, bored with what was on ITV 3, and then started to have a chat over a cup of earl grey about what to do with themselves for the afternoon. Someone suggests to go shoe shopping then another suggests “Hey let’s go to Earth and destroy the humans. I hear it’s fun this time of year and we can stop by Mars for pancakes!” Everyone cheers at this and then heads over to Earth for genocide and Doritos.

Skyline is the latest in a long line of firms of the third kind. Whoopee, can we guess what happens?

One night, strange lights descend out of the sky on the city of Los Angles, a city which only just lost to the 7th layer of Hell and Stoke-On-Trent in a recent “Top 10 Places to Suffer Pain” survey, drawing people outside like fat people to an all-you-can-eat buffet where an unknown extraterrestrial force threatens to wipe the entire human population off the face of the Earth. By using a hoover from what I can make out.

Eric Balfour shows up in Los Angles for a birthday party type thing as some bloke who does something well, who could only look more at home if he was someone’s pretty bitch in prison, with his ladyfriend Scottie Thompson seems to be taking up the background while being “pregnant”. There are other people in the film, but it makes little difference to mention them. Who cares?

While one may suspect that this tired old plot device would have featured later in the film at a truly pivotal moment, it only took the opening 30 seconds after the night sky in LA started to light up with strange blue things to find out that Scottie (Not James Doohan) was pregnant, due to some wonderful dialogue stating it can’t be morning yet, and then calmly proceeding to be sick in the toilet.

The first 25 minutes after the required “oh my god!” moment of the opening sequence, proceed to paint a picture of a world about a LA big shot stereotype who has friends or “useless over-paid c*nts”, bodies that make us normal humans want to beat the perfect people with rocks, big cars with an exhaust when fired makes you think you’re in a war zone, and lots of the usual wonderfully vapid women hanging around.

So when the alien attack begins, it comes as something of a relief, and somehow you end up rooting for the aliens to put us out of our misery. The cast then start dying every few minutes, some of which were during unintentional hilarious set-pieces, when the fancy sports car was stepped on by a big foot. Or they look at the pretty light which does something funky to human skin and then get sucked away.

It’s often remarkable that during the alien attack, people find time to worry about normal things like adultery or someone smoking. Yes, Scottie for a few moments reaches for the wonderful “I’m pregnant” device, when after escaping death for a little while, another lady needs a smoke to calm down. Nice to see Scottie has a grasp of the gravity of the situation.

Most of the time, you can’t help but make the comparison to the monster-manic 2008 movie “Cloverfield”, where most of the action is viewed from the point of view of normal every day folks.

But whereas over time the cast and story in “Cloverfield” drew you in and you felt something despite the opening few minutes forcing you to hate them, here in Skyline, you are just looking for everyone to die, maybe in a fashion which involves forcing a dildo up the nose of Eric Balfour which then explodes, covering everything in “ooze” which melts everyone within the blast radius.

Damn, that alone would make an excellent film.

The story is practically non-existent and instead just seems to be put in place as an excuse for fancy hoovering special effects (something I’d never thought I’d write), and we never get any explanation as to why the aliens started all this off in the first place. The ending just defies whatever creditability was just about clinging onto life up to that point.

It’s hard to recommend this film to anyone who doesn’t have brain damage. Ladies and gentleman, I didn’t think it was possible but bless Hollywood, we could be facing a tie for the year’s worst (or perhaps pointless) film between this and the Expendables. But as this film had 1% less bad acting per minute, the Expendables remains the film to beat for the unwanted crown.