I Got Scammed
I should have known better. I should have seen the signs. Luckily, I’m only out $15.00.
The scammer in question is director Olatunde Osunsanmi, and the scam is his laughably bad new film, The Fourth Kind, which I’m happy to report was 98 minutes of pure incoherence. The Fourth Kind has been much hyped, and the little bit of the plot revealed in trailers (a psychologist investigates alien abductions in a remote Alaska town) seemed pretty interesting. Boy, was I ever wrong.
Warning: Here Be Spoilers. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
As I said, I should have seen the warning signs. The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich (who is, along with Elias Koteas, this movie’s only saving grace) standing in the woods and explaining that what we’re about to see is a dramatization based on real events that happened in Nome, Alaska, in 2000. I hated (hated!) the Blair Witch, I’m not a believer by nature, and I have a hard time suspending disbelief for anything but a really good story.
To achieve the mockumentary affect, two movies were filmed: a “dramatization” starring Jovovich and Elias Koteas, and the ostensible “original footage” featuring a bunch of no-name actors shot with camcorders. At various points in the movie, the two are presented side-by-side in a split screen. Sadly this doesn’t lend the movie any credibility, it just looks cluttered and confusing. The original footage also has an annoying tendency to get blurry and swim in and out of focus whenever anything really interesting happens. Jovovich goes to pains to explain that most of the characters besides hers have been given aliases, because they are real people and they are really concerned about privacy.
Jovovich and her unnamed double play Abbey Tyler, a psychologist working in Nome, Alaska. Her husband was murdered in their bed while she was mysteriously paralyzed and unable to help him. Tyler can’t remember who killed him, only a disembodied arm stabbing him through the chest. She and her husband were working on some sort of government project, analyzing the residents of Nome who have all been reporting the same dream in which they wake up at 3:00 AM to find a creepy white owl staring at them.
Now that her husband is gone, Abbey is alone in a big house with her two kids, a precocious little asshole of a son and a daughter who went blind for some reason when her dad died. The son apparently blames his mom for everything - his father’s death, his sister’s blindness, the down economy, the cancellation of Arrested Development. In one scene he storms away from the dinner table, yelling, “You help everyone else! Why can’t you help yourself?!” These little outbursts have no impact on the plot, so forget I even mentioned them.
Abbey decides that there’s something to the owl dream, so she puts one of the townspeople under hypnosis and interrogates him. He admits that there is no owl, and that he saw something else and it came into his room. He then flips out and does a somersault over the couch, knocking over a table and smashing a lamp. Back at home, he decides that whatever he saw was so scary, the only way to escape it is to kill his entire family and himself. The police surround his house and Abbey is called out to negotiate, but she can’t stop him from doing the deed. Back at the police station, the sheriff accuses Abbey of killing people through hypnosis and threatens to arrest her. This is his standard response to anything Abbey does for the rest of the movie.
The next day, Abbey hypnotizes another patient, who also remembers something in his room. He helpfully says, “They’re not from here”, and that they smell like putrid cinnamon. Then he too freaks out and nearly chokes to death on his own vomit, Elvis-style. Meanwhile, Abbey’s receptionist has been transcribing a taped diary that Abbey records every night at bedtime. After she falls asleep, the tape records her screaming and some garbled talking in a metallic voice.
Abbey analyzes the tape and discovers that the garbled language is Sumerian, an ancient language of the Middle East. She does this with the help of a book on Sumerian that her late husband picked up somewhere and was reading immediately before his death. She calls up the author and he flies to Nome at his own expense to help her. I guess it’s not every day that you get to put a degree in Sumerian Studies to use.
Meanwhile, Abbey’s psychologist buddy Dr. Campos (this is an alias because he is a really real person) has showed up from Anchorage to help her. Abbey, Campos, and the Sumerian expert listen to the tape together, and he manages to pick out words like “traveler”, “heavens” and “destroy”. He then implies that because the Sumerians made a lot of weird-looking art and had their own versions of the book of Genesis and the Noah story, they were capable of space travel and were most likely aliens. Campos (played by the outstanding and totally-wasted-on-this-movie Elias Koteas) says that that doesn’t make any sense. Just as everyone else in the theater is agreeing with him, the three of them get an urgent call about Scott, the vomit-choker from the previous day.
Scott is in bed having a nervous breakdown when the gang arrives. He says he’s having more bad dreams, but he can’t remember, but he doesn’t want to be hypnotized, but he has to be, but he doesn’t want to because he’s afraid. They hypnotize him. In the only genuinely surprising moment in the movie, Scott levitates off his bed and begins talking in Sumerian. Then the shitty “original camera footage” gets all blurry and you can’t see what happens next. This is supposed to be “shocking” and “real”, but I would have preferred some good old special effects to this obvious budget shortcut.
After Scott’s floating episode, he exits stage-left and is never heard from again. Maybe he dies, it’s hardly important. The sheriff shows up and threatens to arrest Abbey again, but instead he puts her under house arrest and stations a police cruiser outside. In the middle of the night, the officer watching her house sees something and gets out to investigate. Just when something cool is about to happen, the “original footage cam” craps out and all you hear is the guy saying, “Oh my god sir! Do you see it! It’s floating above their house!” Seriously?
Inside the house, Abbey is freaking out. She says that a beam of light came through the ceiling and abducted her daughter. “Horsehit,” says the sheriff. (Bravo!) The cops take her son away, but he’s too busy verbally abusing her to be upset. In desperation, Abbey decides to hypnotize herself so she can “get to the source” of the aliens and get her daughter back. She, Campos, and the Sumerian expert set up a camera in her office and put her under. Finally, we get to see aliens!
...Except we don’t. We see the “alien’s eye view” moving into her house, down the hall, and into her bedroom. Then we see Milla Jovovich’s legs, some bedsheets, and it’s over. The “original footage” takes over and gets all staticky. Milla’s boring double does a backflip over the couch and starts talking in Sumerian. The subtitles reveal a long, rambling speech about how the aliens rule the heavens, and are never giving her daughter back, and finally the alien says, “I AM GOD”. Uh, okay.
At the end of the movie, Abbey is in the hospital. Her daughter is never found, her son is taken away and becomes “estranged” from her, Campos goes back to his practice in Anchorage, and the Sumerian expert gets tenure at a prestigious Canadian university. I have no idea why they decided to tell us this last bit, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in this train wreck of a movie. Milla Jovovich and the director come back and remind us that these are the facts, and what we choose to believe us up to us.
Oh, and it turns out her husband wasn’t murdered after all. He shot himself in the head, thus rendering yet another part of the plot insensible.
In conclusion, this movie was a total disappointment. The documentary plot device was transparent and badly executed. The characters were almost totally undeveloped, the scares were minimal.
Despite what I said earlier, I don’t blame the director. The guy is in the movie, and he seems nice enough. I blame the studio and the marketers, who hyped the hell out of a half-baked effort that should have been shitcanned long before it saw the front of a camera. They got my money this time, but next time I’ll be smarter.
