Is it Real, or is it Crap?


Two films have been released this autumn that fall in the vein of The Blair Witch Project: feature motion pictures produced from purported actual archival video capturing elements of the unexplained.

The newly released The Fourth Kind, starring Milla Jovovich, is one of those “let’s pretend this is real using actual video footage” movies, like Paranormal Activity, except here the filmmakers augment the archival “footage” with “dramatic reenactments.” The premise involves a close encounter of the fourth kind, abduction, and the aliens here are not the happy ET’s of Spielberg’s movies. These are bad beings with a grudge.

The set up is intriguing: a psychologist in Nome, Alaska (Jovovich), has patients who seem to all have abduction accounts when placed under hypnosis. And so, too, as it turns out, does our heroine. But the result is uneven, and the climax never really wraps anything up, except to suggest that these bizarre nocturnal owl sightings are really alien abductions, which the audience knows from the get-go. So going in, the audience already knows “the big secret,” so the filmmakers have the responsibility not only to tell a compelling story, but to bring us to a climax that pays off somehow. They fail at both.

The flip side of the coin is Paranormal Activity, which emerged on the festival circuit two years ago but received a wide U.S. release in October. Its premise is very simple and effective: a young couple experience unusual noises and happenings in their San Diego home, and set up a video camera in order to not only record their every waking (and sleeping) move, but to hopefully capture whatever it is that may be haunting them. The film that audiences see is supposedly culled from video tapes released by the San Diego police department.

Director Oren Peli shot this film, which has grossed more than $80 million thus far, at home, in seven days, for $15,000, and delivers a tense and spooky film wherein what the audience doesn’t see is often scarier than what it does. It’s been a while since off-camera audio and mere sound effects have provided such a powerful emotional impact on audiences. And a few of the sequences, shot during the night, in time lapse, are rough and grainy and as spooky as anything I've seen in a movie in a long time. Shot simply in a cinema verite style, this film succeeds where The Fourth Kind comes across as merely a bad two hours of “UFO Stories” on the History Channel.

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