The Fourth Kind (2009)
Review by Jeffery J. Timbrell
Alien abduction scares the shit out of me.
I’m not scared of alien abduction actually happening to me; the idea that a species would travel millions of light years or create a worm-hole through time and space to come look up my ass makes me laugh hysterically like a classical musical composer at a Lady Gaga concert. What terrifies me is that real people live out their day to day lives thinking that big-headed, alien, serial space rapists come to earth to mess with them in the middle of the night, pulling them out of their beds kicking and screaming to play a real-life version of Operation or Hide the Glowing Finger.
Sure people who are non-believers can chortle up their sleeve regarding aliens searching for space-science gold in the rectums of rednecks, but I don’t think any rational person would want to be in the shoes of an individual who actually dreads every nightfall waiting for the almond-eyed sonsofbitches to come squirming into their room to do an intergalactic reenactment of the Paris Hilton sex tapes.
These people who are obsessed with alien abduction have placed Earth squarely in the orbit of the White Trash part of the universe. They believe they’re living on the interstellar equivalent of that endless desert road in those Australian post-apocalyptic grindhouse flicks. And they’re being visited nightly (sometimes hourly) by the alien-equivalent of those roaming Aussie bully gangs; a plethora of inbred, chicken-strangling, cow-mutilating, goat-sucking, banjo-playing, Kangaroo-shooting, space geeks who want to kidnap the wimmen folk and strap them to the hood of their UFOs like Cassandra Delaney in Fair Game.
A horror movie done from the perspective of someone living in that reality would probably be the most frightening film any human being could ever possibly imagine.
So it’s pretty sad that The Fourth Kind took a step in that direction, only to aspire to being a crappy episode of Unsolved Mysteries instead.
I’m not kidding; The Fourth Kind borrows its entire structure from the old Unsolved Mysteries approach of reenacting actual events with actors and throwing in clips of supposed real footage as ‘evidence’. The Fourth Kind’s formula is so retro ‘80s schlock all it needed was Robert Stack’s soothing voice and a TV remote so I could change the channel to watch Go-Bots. Hilariously enough, trying to convince the online audience that these were in-fact ’actual events’ by creating fake viral stories got Universal Studios sued by Alaskan newspapers. The bone-headed people behind the PR actually used the name of real papers to fabricate their whole ‘aliens are gang-banging our small town’ plotline. Jeez. Orson Welles created more mass hysteria over aliens via radio-broadcast; and he did it by accident!
The Fourth Kind uses the gimmick of ‘real footage!’ to try and lend a sense of YouTube-style authenticity (uh, yeah) to its ridiculous storyline which features genre vet Milla Jovovich as ‘Milla Jovovich – Actress’ (no doubt her toughest role to date). The story deals with a psychologist (played by ‘Milla Jovovich – Actress’) who has been investigating cases of the unknown in Alaska; she tragically lost her husband (also a paranormal investigator) who was murdered mysteriously while she was sleeping. This leaves Milla demanding hypnosis treatments to regain lost memories; which leads to much space alien hullabaloo and lots of people getting harassed by owls. The movie involves many cases of people seeing owls outside their house or inside their house and much like the Mothman Prophecies; they soon discover that these owls are perhaps something OTHER than owls. The first hint of course, is that the owls speak Sumerian. Which owls do not typically do? The other hint is that they call themselves God, kidnap children using tractor beams, have psychic powers, can interfere with video equipment (but not audio equipment, conveniently enough) and make people break their own necks via hypnotic suggestion/demonic voice-over. This again is not typical of the Snowy Owls of Alaska.
And this is where The Fourth Kind leads into its all important third act, where all the secrets are revealed and the events unfold showing us the meaning behind everything culminating in a satisfying and exciting conclusion…is what I would be writing if this movie had a third act. Unfortunately instead of a third act, this movie has …nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Mila Jovovich tells us that instead of the people who created this story coming up with a decent conclusion; it’s up to the audience to decide what to believe.
Say what?
I just sat through a whole film about owls and demonic voices and watching people’s faces get distorted using cheap tricks that twelve year olds do on YouTube via Adobe After Effects. And now, after all of that, the filmmakers want to be ambiguous?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; the whole film has relied on cheap gimmicks to try and make its paper-thin storyline float. The majority of its running time has been spent replacing stuff like plot and characterization and subtext with really loud sound-effects and video distortion and a bunch of owls saying “You sure do have a pretty Ovipositor” in Sumerian. So why not use a cheap gimmick for an ending?
You say it’s my choice what to believe?
Well, I choose to believe that this movie is a mountain of thunderous buffalo crap.
I believe that The Fourth Kind is the type of movie that makes average film-goers long for an all-night marathon viewing of the remake of the Wicker Man. The Fourth Kind wants to be The Blair Witch, The Mothman Prophecies and Fire in the Sky combined into one massive juggernaut of Grey Alien hysteria; instead it’s just really boring, derivative and dumb. Like the person on Who Wants to be a Millionaire who thought elephants were larger than the moon; The Fourth Kind is not just bad, it’s bad and depressing. In my wildest fantasies, I would have a hard time creating a more cynical and downright sad perspective of the universe. For people who like to contemplate the vastness of wonders out there in space; who tear up at the sight of the deep field images of the Hubble telescope as they realize how infinitesimally small we are in the greater scheme of creation; the perspective of a movie like The Fourth Kind is like taking the most awesome and wondrous treasure in human history and burying it underneath a mountain of McDonald’s hamburgers. It’s the kind of movie that looks out the window at the stars and what might await us in space and dreams of alien civilizations who seemingly only know how to communicate via cheap horror movie clichés.
The Fourth Kind feels more like a made for TV, SyFy channel flick of the week, than a major feature from an actual film studio. This is the sort of junk that is destined to plague some poor bastard’s channel surfing for a few short moments on a random Saturday night. This is a film that people will watch to avoid the Shamwow and Slapchop commercials; only to discover that the Slapchop commercials are more entertaining.
The Fourth Kind is one of those movies that is destined to get expelled to the consumer-driven hell of the two dollar DVD bargain bin of your local video store; where it’ll spend the rest of eternity hanging out with the director’s cut of Daredevil and the special edition of Short Circuit 2. It’s kind of like Dragonball Evolution, where if the hot teller at the rental store sees you picking it up, they’ll never talk to you again.
And your hand will end up smelling funny.
Watch the trailer:
Popularity: 2% [?]
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