HorrorSpeak---Terror Awaits You in Every Forum!!!!: THE FOURTH KIND

THE FOURTH KIND (2009)

Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

Milla Jovovich as Dr. Abbey Tyler
Elias Koteas as Dr. Abel Campos
Will Patton as Sheriff August

** Minor Spoilers **

Caught this yesterday at the theater. Overall I enjoyed it. It's not an incredible piece of cinema creation and it's takes awhile for the film to find it's pacing, but if you liked Fire In The Sky for example, I think this will really turn you on. The plots are quite similar, only you're more in the middle of the action in this one versus doing alot of back-looking at the events in FITS. Both films claim to be based on actual events. The Fourth Kind claims it with gusto as explained below. It's not an extremely brutal or bloody film, but on the other hand it is dark and there's definitely not a storybook ending. And while I'm not an X-Files UFO fanatic, the movie did send me running to Google and Wikipedia to do some research on Nome, Alaska.

It's unusual in that the film is interlaced with *actual interview* footage of possible abduction victims, as well as alot of audio only recordings. So there's alot of split screen time between archive A/V and actors portraying the same scenes. They do a pretty good job of not confusing you by using captioning to explain who's on the archive parts and clarify garbled audio. I suspect they do this in a misleading way as well. Some of the captions note *actual footage* while other captions on archived scenes do not include that note. So I spent alot of the movie trying to separate the fiction from the fact. If this kind of ambiguity throws you (as in say The Amityville Horror) then definitely skip this as ambiguity is in overdrive in this one and will drive you nuts.

I think they go overboard with the split screen, especially in one scene where the screen not only splits into quadrants, but they also resize back and forth to draw your attention to a particular section. It was very distracting, pulled me out of the movie momentarily, and frankly that particular scene didn't call for any more that one split at the most.

** Major Spoilers **

Jovovich and Osunsanmi cap either end of the film with a bit of narration regarding the real life individuals and story claims. Most interesting was the FBI statistic that agents have visited small town Nome around 2000 times since the 1960s. In contrast, Alaska's largest city Anchorage has been visited around 300 times. Is any of this stuff true or even factual? Well, that's kind of the point of this kind of film I suppose. I think many media creators have this April's Fool mentality to them that occasionally squirts out an Orsen Wells' War of the Worlds type scenario. If the idea of this movie interests you, my advice would be to go see it before doing any investigating.

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"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!"
- Lewis Carroll