Way back when, Steven Spielberg had in development a kind of follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind where in a group on sinister aliens terrorized a farm family, whose only ally was the one, sympathetic alien. Well somewhere between idea and principal photography, the movie called Night Skies ended up becoming two movies called Poltergeist and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. I couldn’t help but feel that the filmmakers behind Aliens in the Attic had Night Skies in mind when making their project, albeit transplanting the horror elements for something a little more family friendly.

Now ordinarily, “family film” is code for “what we have here is a way to pacify your kids for two hours in the dead of summer, parents.” But you know what? I enjoyed Aliens myself. On the surface, it’s got everything in common with typical family movies about smarmy kids and clueless parents, but it’s also got a lot of heart, a talented young cast and some genuinely funny moments. It may have all the depth of your typical episode of Saved by the Bell, or to update the reference, Hannah Montana, but there is something genuinely winning about the final product that manages to make it more than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps comparisons to a little heard of, never made Spielberg films aren’t the way to go, instead think of Aliens in the Attic as mash-up of two films from 1990: Home Alone and Spaced Invaders. The latter was a little movie about a group of inept Martians that fail to take over the world, arriving Halloween night with their battle cry: “Prepare to die, Earth scum!” The diminutive aliens of The Attic are about on par with the Spaced Invaders in terms of both brains and strategy, but one of the four, Sparks, is a rather sweet natured engineer that thinks that the humans their fighting aren’t all bad. The Pearson kids, meanwhile, use tactics perfected by General Macaulay Culkin in the Battle of Two Idiots at Christmas to blow back the invasion.

The kids are led by young Tom (Carter Jenkins), who’s purposely flunked his classes because he’s tired of his geek creds and aims for something cooler. So far as character drama goes that’s kind of lame, and can you already guess that Tom’s ample AP Math skills come in handy when facing off against a technologically superior alien enemy? You better believe they do. Tom also lives in the shadow of his seemingly perfect sister Bethany played with maximum annoyance by High School the Musical’s Ashley Tisdale. Of course without Bethany, we wouldn’t get the onslaught of hilarity in her smarmy boyfriend Ricky (Robert Hoffman), who’s taken over by the aliens to be used as their human puppet.

Of course, I was frequently caught wondering why Tom and Bethany’s parents (Kevin Nealon and Gillian Vigman) couldn’t see through Ricky’s Eddie Haskell-like BS, but that’s okay. Aliens in the Attic isn’t about deconstruction of the form, although there was one scene where after the kids discover the aliens they run for their signal-less cell phones and are stuck for what to do until Tom’s little sister points out the land line. You know you’re old when the sight of a rotary telephone has a certain nostalgic charm, but for the kids who know technology as quick and compactable the scene provided a hilarious juxtapose. I could practically see the heads of parents nodding in the dark in silent understanding.

No, Aliens in the Attic isn’t perfect, and I didn’t mind because it delivers on what it intends. It can be silly in places, but overall I found Aliens to be rather pleasing and easily enjoyable. You might have to find that kids part of your brain in order to do it, but this film is actually pleasantly inoffensive to adult sensibilities. If anything it’ll teach the kids the value of family and how expertise in video games might actually someday come in handy. Along those same lines it might also teach kids that Math is cool and grandma can kick butt under the right circumstances. That’s probably not what the kids will take away from this movie, but compared to the grade A pabulum that is the more tech savvy G-Force, Aliens in the Attic is on a War of the Worlds level of literacy.