Intergalactic Hazing Gone Too Far?

DARK SKIES
* out of ****

I do enjoy scary movies, but not because they're scary.  My appreciation of all film genres is completely versatile, but my appreciation for none of them is by default.  When people ask me what kind of movies I like, my response, as ever, is "good movies".  Admittedly, that doesn't mean much, because what I actually mean is that I like movies that I consider good movies, but the problem with that is that it just sounds stupid.  And then you factor in movies that aren't necessarily to your taste but you admire them, but I'll write about that some other time.  Now, I'll call this a scary movie, but only because it's made with the intention of incurring fright.  For some, the scares might work.  For myself, they did not; in fact, they occasionally provoked laughter.  By my reckoning, that alone is an indication of poor quality, as a successful tearjerker ought to jerk tears, a science fiction ought to fictionalize science, a horror ought to horrify and a thriller ought to thrill.  Through some dumb-ass reasoning, comedies are supposed to make you laugh, but that's beside the point.  But even scares alone simply are not enough.  A scary movie that scares but lacks substance is enjoyable in the sense that it provides the viewer with it's most basic promise, but it won't leave you with much without providing some substance.  Unfortunately, one might think there was a formula sheet or something being passed around the horror branch of the film industry, wherein a few blank spaces may be filled in, not unlike a Mad Libs story, for each new film, because it feels like the same story is being used a dozen times over.  It's kind of a POLTERGEIST-influenced formula with some modern elements tossed in for good measure.  You start with a family, usually a dysfunctional one, especially with marital strife or divorced parents, and you introduce a supernatural element, 99% of the time through one of the children.  The child behaves erratically, maybe winds up with a few marks, like bruises, and sometimes other members of the family join in on the fun.  Then, the parents become concerned, and one of them looks up similar weird occurrences on the internet, hopefully through a search engine product placement, and finds some wacko "expert" or otherwise professional.  The parents meet up with said wacko and realize he's/she's for real; sometimes he/she helps them, sometimes they just offer advice.  Then you have a climax, and sometimes a last minute twist.
DARK SKIES plays through the formula like idiotic clockwork, but to its credit, it introduces an interesting new element, that being that the supernatural element is aliens, which are announced at the very beginning of the film, before the titles, with a Carl Sagan quote, so we can blame all the morbid but very silly occurrences on something.  The parents, struggling with mortgage payments and an angsty teenager, are played by Josh Hamilton and Keri Russell, and they're surprisingly reserved about the whole thing; concerned, but rational.  Their youngest has dreams about "the Sandman" and blames weird happenings on his "imaginary" friend, and he draws creepy pictures of him with an alien.  The aliens, at first glance, are a bit ghastly, but you quickly realize that they're just rubbery naked versions of the dementors from the HARRY POTTER films.
That's just the beginning, and there really is not a single original note in this film, and other films, as recently as INSIDIOUS (from the same producers), have done it better.  DARK SKIES may have worked better if shown from the aliens' perspective where the whole thing is really all about a bunch of college-age extra-terrestrial pranksters who get their kicks by messing with all-too-easy human targets.  At least that kind of movie would be intentionally funny.