Screenhead

It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a review of a movie like The Fourth Kind because it’s not really a movie so much as it is an agenda.

Clearly, someone desperately wants us to believe that what we’re seeing is actually really really REALLY REAL, and won’t be satisfied until, my guess is, we start pestering our Congress critters for answers.  I’m not sure.  Because I’ve never left a movie so utterly confused, and I’ve seen David Croenenburg movies.

This one follows Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler, who is played by Milla Jovovich, who actually TELLS us that’s what she’ll be doing in the beginning of the movie.  And we’ll be following her around as she conducts a sleep disorder study on the people of Nome, Alaska.  Now, Nome is downright infamous for being hard to reach, but apparently it’s also got a serious missing persons problem, and it’s somehow become the FBI travel destination of choice, garnering over two thousand official visits when neighbor Anchorage, who has something like seventy times the population, rates only about three hundred visits in that same time frame.

Now, it’s hard to tell at first glance just how much of this is real and how much of it so utterly fake as to be a complete pantload, because the movie is trying so very desperately hard to convince us that EVERYTHING WE SEE IS HAPPENING FOR REALS, YO, by virtue of running split screen so often I thought I was watching 24.  They’ll do two splits and three splits and four splits and four splits with rotating frames.  It got to the point where I wondered, is this a movie or a Final Cut Pro demo?  And they’ll run, almost ad nauseum, “real footage” alongside footage of the actors, to try and cement that belief.

I’ll freely admit that this is some creepy stuff–when that guy started levitating I got a little freaked out, and Abigail Tyler “herself” under hypnosis was a cold chill up my spine but do I believe this actually went down?  No.

See, one great line from the movie that manages to describe the movie in its entirety is where one of the “patients” is muttering that he’s okay, and “Dr. Tyler” swings in with “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”  And that’s exactly what I thought of this movie.  Yes, okay, you’re going to RELENTLESSLY show me this “real footage” and insist, as loudly and vociferously as possible that it’s real, and frankly, I kind of doubt it.

Folks, this has allegedly been going on since the year 2000.  But somehow it took almost TEN YEARS for someone to exploit it?  Come ON.  We’re talking about a Hollywood scene so desperate that TWO GARFIELD MOVIES looked like a good idea but we’ve got allegedly actual footage of a woman shrieking that she’s god in SUMERIAN and NO ONE’S ran with that ball yet?

The Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in a dismissive back of hand “bah” to this creepy but horrendously disjointed fright fest and acknowledges that the idea is pretty scary but forces my suspension of disbelief engines to glow white hot and give off an ominous whining noise.  Thus, it hands this incredulous horror romp a five out of ten for being creepy yet not even vaguely credible.

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