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With their new June additions, Hulu has reached new heights of horror. Fire in the Sky is now streaming, so prepare to be terrified.
Or not. If you’re me, then yes, prepare to be terrified. If your body doesn’t shut down in fear every single time it sees a little grey alien, then maybe this movie won’t do it for you. But if Signs sent shivers down your spine while others were laughing at the “swing away” reveal, then Fire in the Sky will terrify you–at least for 13 of its 109 minutes.
Even the ads for this movie terrified me when I was a kid. The Fire in the Sky marketing team bought space in pretty much every Marvel comic published in early 1993, so the image of a man being hit with a UFO’s light beam is inextricably tied to my memories of early ’90s X-Men. The film tells the story of the disappearance and alleged abduction of Arizona logger Travis Walton. Unsolved Mysteries fans know that the truly scariest stories always begin with this:
Shut it down. Aliens are real. This movie proved it in 1993. Why aren’t we talking about this more?!
This “true story” claim is actually accurate. Fire in the Sky is based on true events that took place in 1975, and a solid hour and a half of the film follows the realistic fallout after a bunch of loggers claim that one of their own was abducted by aliens. It takes a while for the terrifying abduction business to begin. Until then, there are more mundane horrors to be witnessed–like Robert Patrick’s whole hair situation.
I didn’t know the T-1000 used to be in the Allman Brothers Band!
I also need to point this out, because it will greatly decrease Fire in the Sky’s scariness if you don’t acknowledge and deal with this right away: Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney) looks just like Paul Rudd in Wet Hot American Summer.
It also doesn’t help the horror to realize that Travis is basically a Manic Pixie Dream Dude. He’s cool and quirky and full of dreams and love. He drives his motorcycle on the sidewalk and will deliver donuts directly to your window!
So yeah, you can watch Fire in the Sky as an unofficial prequel to Wet Hot American Summer wherein Paul Rudd’s doofy bad boy gets abducted and tortured by aliens. That’s up to you.
The film kicks off with the loggers (minus Travis) stumbling into a bar, having just witnessed something truly harrowing and possibly extraterrestrial. Around 20 minutes in, we finally hear about what happened out in the forest, which unfolds in flashback while the loggers tell James Garner’s gruff police lieutenant. While driving back from a routine logging gig (which is definitely not the right word), the sextet drove towards what they described as a fire…in the sky. Travis, being filled with wonder, is drawn to the red light like a bug to a bug zapper.
Seriously, that’s Paul Rudd. Are we sure that Paul Rudd wasn’t known as D.B. Sweeney pre-Clueless?
Rudd–I mean Travis–is drawn to a spacecraft that, well, kinda looks like a giant molten lava… nipple? Kinda?
Travis gets knocked back by bolt of white light, terrifying the men in the truck. They drive off in a panic, and Travis’ body is gone when Robert Patrick drives back to look for him. This scene, the only real bit of alien business in the first 80 minutes of the movie, is super tense.
From there, the film fills itself with gossip and drama as the residents of Snowflake try to figure out if these five dudes killed the only guy in town ready and willing to deliver doughnuts by motorcycle. There’s a search party, a professional Ufologist that looks like a secret World War II Nazi, and a rowdy town hall meeting. Basically, 90 minutes of this movie feels like lost alien abduction episode of Parks & Recreation.
The men aren’t absolved of murdering Travis until something truly terrifying happens: Robert Patrick gets a collect call.
Travis has reemerged, five days later, at a gas station just outside town. When they find him, he’s totally naked and deathly afraid of being touched. His friends and family first call in the creepy Ufologist, then they take Travis to a hospital. It’s there, as the traumatized Travis is being pulled along on a gurney and then inspected by doctors, that we start to get flashes of inhuman creatures.
Shit’s about to get real.
After waiting for an hour and twenty-two minutes, we finally get to see what happened to Travis–at least fictional Travis. Real Travis had his whole story called into question during an appearance on a TV game show in 2008. That’s showbiz!
Back in the film, Travis’ welcome home party takes a turn for the post-traumatic when, while crouched in fear under a kitchen table, a bit of goopy maple syrup drops on his face. That then triggers a 13-minute sequence set inside the UFO that is just…very upsetting. If you are terrified of aliens or goop, then this is your warning. There’s a lot of aliens and goop ahead.
After the flash of light, Travis wakes up inside a tight, grungy, crusty, and messy chamber with only a thin membrane keeping him in place. It’s disgusting.
He pushes his way out into a zero-gravity chamber and then accidentally swings into another pod, landing in goop…that was previously a person. No thank you, movie, no thank you!
Travel pulls himself up towards the light and flies/falls into a chamber filled with what look like the classic big-eyed grey aliens. These turn out to be space suits–and not all of them are empty!
The nonstop unsettling visuals are too much and this sequence was paced for maximum tension. I pitched this article knowing I’d have to watch it while at work, and I’m a cowering mess in full view of the entire office. I did this to myself.
The aliens then overpower Travis and rush him down the UFO’s corridors, kicking up so much dirt along the way. Seriously, the UFO is filled with old shoes, books, and glasses. There’s just loose paper and dirt everywhere. These aren’t the sterile aliens we’re used to. These are aliens that need to go on Hoarders.
They drag Travis into an operating room, throwing him on a slab. The extraterrestrials then reveal themselves to be…
…squinty-eyed and phallic nightmare puppets. Again, no thank you.
The aliens then begin torturing Travis using methodology straight out of a Tool or Aphex Twin music video. They laminate Travis using a milky white paper, muffling his screams.
I hate this.
It’s at this point that the movie remembers it hasn’t given us enough goop-based torture in the last few minutes. Goop in the mouth! Goop in the eyes! This is more goop than even Gwyneth Paltrow could handle!
I’m now discovering that it is possible to be deeply unnerved while using Photoshop. This movie isn’t just scary on Hulu, it’s also scary while using graphics editing software.
The sequence ends with a laminated and gooped up Travis bracing himself to have his eye penetrated by a grimy alien needle. I’m not putting a still of that in here, no way. This one sequence is but a small portion of the small-town tale that is Fire in the Sky, but it’s one sequence that will live on in my nightmares now that I’ve forced myself to rewatch it and dissect it, much like how a grey probably dissected Travis’ eye.
I have to take a minute.
Okay. That’s basically the movie. From there we flash forward a few years later. Travis got married and started a family, and Robert Patrick quit the Allman Brothers Band and apparently joined Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The movie closes out on an update, saying that three of the loggers (including Travis) took another lie detector test in 1993 and they all passed. Too bad Travis couldn’t have passed 15 years later when he took a polygraph on national television!
Fire in the Sky isn’t consistent when it comes to scares-per-minute, as all the horror is packed in one disgusting sequence. But if you’re as terrified as I am of aliens, alien abductions, goop, or Skynyrd hair, then Fire in the Sky will rattle you to your bones. I don’t recommend watching this in public.
Photos: Hulu, Netflix
