The Fourth Kind
If you want to see The Fourth Kind due to the great trailers for it I will advise you to stop reading immediately. Go into it blindly, convince yourself that the “footage” is real and that Director Olatunde Osunsanmi was given the rights to use it to make a Box Office movie. Fool yourself into thinking that this woman Dr. Abbey Taylor (Milla Jovovich) is real and that her life has been hell created by a bunch of evil, Sumerian speaking Extra Terrestrials. Or you can take a common sense approach and see it as a new attempt at horror, utilizing aliens, the unknown and the mysteries of hypnosis.
You know it’s a bad sign when a movie is based on an event where none of the actual people want anything to do with it whatsoever – as explained in the closing credits. Upon seeing the trailers for The Fourth Kind, I assumed that the supposed footage shown was of actual people experiencing the UFO phenomenon, yet while watching the movie, I quickly realized that the footage was fabricated. Osunsanmi periodically splits the screen to show you the “real” events (which arguably look disturbing given the crappy quality, sepia tone and realistic looking people) and the other side showing the dolled up actors and actresses reenacting the footage. It struck me as pretty worthless and unnecessary after putting two and two together that it wasn’t legit.
Having this released so closely to a better attempt at horror in Paranormal Activity was not a good idea. Unlike PA, there wasn’t a feeling of unknown dread, people in the theater were not visibly shaken and at the end of it all people seemed more confused than shaken. It felt like an episode of the X-Files shot to appear “real” yet I somehow feel that the X-Files would have done a much better job than The Fourth Kind. As much as I like Milla Jovovich as an action heroine, her attempts at drama such as this one is just a hard sale every time. As doctor Abbey Tyler, she plays a woman who is made a target of vindictive aliens after she tapes three patients undergoing hypnosis and revealing that they had been abducted. The people have visible scars but remember nothing of their abductions until they are hypnotized by Dr. Abbey. Along with pissing off the aliens, Abbey’s probing (no pun intended) leads to some strange things happening to the patients that she tries to help.
The three patients have similar memories, one being a large white owl outside of their windows, they fall asleep and awake to a loud, terrifying noise outside their doors and then black out. One man, after revealing his abduction to her begins to scream, levitates, then twists violently and drops. Another man leaves the session and offs his entire family including himself. After these occurrences, the threats strike home as Abbey’s daughter gets abducted along with she herself. The most annoying part of the movie deals with the Sheriff named August (Will Patton), this idiot comes into Tyler’s home and threatens to arrest her for mysterious charges. All he knows is that her patients are getting hurt, yet he isn’t a detective, doesn’t suggest that he is more than some hick cop and threatens her several times that he was going to arrest her. For what Sheriff August? You worthless, unnecessarily bad character for this movie, what are the charges buddy?
Seeing Milla bawl her eyes out for her daughter and beg the sheriff not to arrest her, did absolutely nothing for me. If I was the type to walk out of movies, I would have walked out on this one. Another issue I had was with a tape-recording made of the Alien speaking Sumerian to Tyler. It sounded demonic and confused me as to where they were going with it. Are aliens demons in the sky that abduct and probe people at 3:33 am every morning? What is their point, why is 3:33 am so important, is it because 6:66 am doesn’t exist? This is where I roll my eyes and face palm the relevance of it all. The scare factor of the movie relied heavily on old and predictable methods such as extremely loud noises, people screaming with distorted mouths and of course the foreign language that hints at demons. They also give you the blurred, oh I can see what’s going on but I am too drugged glimpse of what went on during the abduction. From what I made out, I saw Abbey Tyler’s bare feet in a bizarre worm eye’s view up-skirt shot… then there was a surgical shiny steel spike going north. Yes the age-old probe that we all fear from abductions.
Unless you are a big fan and conspiracy theorists on Area 51 and UFO phenomena you may want to save your money for something that will actually entertain you. I felt The Fourth Kind to be contrived, a bit too long and ineffective in convincing me that Abbey, the hick cop and her family are inspired by real people.
STAR RATING: (3/10) ★★★★★★★★★★
Filed under Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction, Thriller · Tagged with aliens, milla jovovich, paranormal, sumerian
