Filmociraptor

The horror movies have stretched beyond Halloween and into November with Milla Jovovich's The Fourth Kind. This found-footage/cinema hybrid promised real scares with its trailer where Milla, as Milla, not a character, tells the audience that the footage you're about to see is real or backed up by recorded evidence. But does The Fourth Kind deliver, or miss the mark?

The Fourth Kind tells the story of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist in Nome, Alaska who, after continuing her dead husbands work, unwittingly gets herself in the middle of a web of people all experiencing the same encounters with "extra-terrestrial intelligences"....or aliens. Dr. Tyler begins using hypnosis on her patients to try and unlock memories of her patients' visits from the beings and winds up with footage of some really effing crazy shit. Soon enough, Tyler herself becomes the victim of the visitations and what seems to be attacks and possessions by the invaders.

The movie starts off incredibly rocky. Like aggro-crag rocky. Jovovich plays the dramatized version of Dr. Tyler and while she does give us something to look at (the real Tyler looks more like an alien than anything else seen in the film) she has a rough time getting started. She's an action star, not a deep dramatic actress so when she tries to add subtle nuance or emotion to a scene it feels forced to the point of rape. However, about 25 minutes into the movie it finds its footing and so does Milla, making for a bit smoother of a ride.

We've seen story telling like this before where cinematic scenes are complimented by "real" footage and it didn't work too badly here. Not great, but not too bad. The whole story is essentially told by Dr. Tyler herself through an interview she gave in 2002, two years after the incident took place. The deal breaker though is how much of the footage you actually buy. And now, after doing a little bit of research, I don't buy a whole lot of it, but that doesn't make the storytelling not effective or scary. Assuming that the majority of it is bullshit, the film makers did a great job of producing realistic footage to try and sell their film, and using different actors to portray the "found footage" characters and the cinematic version was a nice little device. It worked on me at least.

Some of the imagery in the clips is straight up terrifying to the point where the "what if it's real" possibility is enough to keep you living in populated areas where the are no fucking owls for the rest of your natural life. It is creepy to say the very least. Most of the time when the interesting stuff is going down, the archive footage goes all kinds of wobbly like when the tracking is off on a VCR, but it clears up just enough to show you a few haunting images. 

Here's the rub. If aliens have the technology to use a tractor beam to lift a little girl THROUGH her ceiling and into a ship, don't you think they'd be able to hide their presence a little better than just scrambling some video footage? The footage is creepy to be sure, but amazingly convenient. It seems to stay clear just long enough for you to see stuff get started and then only give you choice images until the event ends. But the audio during every event remains perfectly clear aside from the fact that the voice is not human and speaking a 6,000 year old dead language. Convenient. 

The movie itself worked for me, but I can see where all of it's flaws would turn people off. The Fourth Kind is a glorified episode of Unsolved Mysteries with a slightly lower cheese factor...slightly. The inconsistent and occasionally dizzying camera work in the "re-enactments," for lack of a better word, is pretty amateurish and was distracting for me. The scares are there on a bit of a different level than what you'll be used to seeing, but unless you let yourself completely believe what's happening, some of the terror will be lost on you. Decent production value, only decent (but pretty terrible in the early minutes) acting, resonating scares.

3 stars