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(as of Jun 15, 2023 00:53:03 UTC – Details)

Nome, Alaska: the edge of the world. What better place for the extraterrestrials to conduct their fiendish abduction experiments? Or so the makers of “The Fourth Kind” insist, in their grim attempt to reveal the truth about these mysterious disappearances. You know the movie means business when actress Milla Jovovich (as herself, without makeup, even) strides toward the camera in the opening moments and introduces things by warning us that we are about to see and hear actual tapes from psychotherapy sessions in which patients recover repressed memories. We might find it disturbing. Yes, but isn’t that why we’re watching the movie? Director Olatunde Osunsanmi soon appears onscreen himself, interviewing the real psychologist whom Jovovich plays, and throughout the film there are rough-looking videos of real people freaking out during hypnosis sessions–and even a bit of alien screeching caught on audio tape. Yep, it’s all real, except it’s all fake. “The Fourth Kind” has an ingenious marketing idea, which is to breathlessly convince the audience they are seeing actual footage of the supposed events, even to the point of playing the video excerpts next to the studio-shot scenes with actors. After a while, you realize that’s all the movie has: the audience’s willingness to believe there’s a ghost of a chance this might have happened. As a horror movie, the thing is clinical and detached, and when you’ve figured out the bogusness of the conceit, that doesn’t leave much. Elias Koteas and Will Patton join Jovovich in the heated story–or should we say, reconstructions of actual events. Aw, phooey. “–Robert Horton”