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...