The Fourth Kind (2009)

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

There are all types of bad movies.

There are so-bad-they're-good movies like Con Air (1997), Road House (1989), and Independence Day (1996) that throw themselves upon you so shamelessly with their brazen ridiculousness that -- like a three-legged weiner dog desperately humping your leg -- you kind of can't help but love them, at least a little bit.

There are so-bad-they're-unwatchable movies like Batman and Robin (1997) and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (2006) that should really just be shot behind the woodshed or drowned in a river like a bag of kittens.

There are B movies. There are Michael Bay movies. There are Larry the Cable Guy movies.

And then there are movies like The Fourth Kind. These are the worst because -- like an abusive boyfriend -- they knock you around for awhile and then come back with a sly smile, a sparkly little trinket, and a solemn promise to do better. You give them another chance, and they just knock you around some more.

The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich walking toward us through some foggy Tim-Burtonesque woodscape and flatly intoning into the camera: "I'm actress Mila Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred in October of 2000. Every scene of this movie is supported by archival footage. Some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing."

Oooh, creepy. This kind of "based on a true story" bullshit is a time-honored tradition in horror movies, starting at least with John Larroquette's equally bullshit (but much more effective) opening narration at the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): "The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths ... Had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day..."

First-time writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries to freshen up this convention by taking it a step further and having his lead actress break the fourth wall. He keeps it going by introducing each new character with a Chyron giving his/her name and the name of the character ("Elias Koteas [as] Dr. Abel Campos" for example). The movie then cuts repeatedly back and forth between the "dramatization" (featuring recognizable if not exactly A-list movie stars) and supposed "archival footage" (featuring unknown and often faceless actors). It's sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Unsolved Mysteries on crack.

Osunsanmi tries his damnedest to keep this conceit going, and he never once misses an opportunity to jump cut between the two modes or to go into a really awkward split screen and overlap the dialogue. It's an interesting strategy at first. Then it's just obnoxious.

The movie purports to be a retelling of an "actual series of events" that took place in Nome, Alaska about a decade ago (this is all news to the people of Nome, apparently). A beautiful young psychiatrist (Jovovich) -- still reeling from her husband's unsolved murder -- discovers a pattern in her patients' recurring nightmares about an owl and decides to put one of them under hypnosis. The guy promptly freaks out and kills his family. The town sheriff (Will Patton) -- who seems to harbor some sort of inexplicable grudge against her (I guess he's annoyed that she keeps bugging him to solve that whole my-husband-was-murdered thing) -- forbids her from hypnotizing any more of her patients. She ignores him and hypnotizes another guy who promptly freaks out, levitates, and snaps his own neck.

And then things get weird.

It's no spoiler to say that this movie revolves around alien abductions. As a card-carrying weirdo freak who's into such stories and who spent four years of college in Alamosa, CO, with the specific hope of seeing a UFO, I was impressed by how much they got right in terms of the mythology. I was unimpressed, however, by how much they got wrong in terms of, you know, filmmaking, acting, writing, and basic storytelling.

There are a few effective moments here and there, and -- like the abusive boyfriend's apology -- they kept me hooked and hoping that the rest of the movie would get better. The footage of the psychiatric sessions and the hypnosis is genuinely freaky, as is the audiotape recording of Dr. Tyler's own apparent abduction. In other words, pretty much all the crap they crammed into the trailer. That stuff's easy, though. If you crush a baby's skull in a car door on camera, you're bound to get a reaction from the audience. The film completely misses on all the difficult stuff -- the character motivation, the cinematography, the story structure, etc -- that actually makes a good movie.

And, as awkward and overcooked as it is, I liked Osunsanmi's faux-docudrama approach. With a little (okay, a LOT) more restraint, it could have been effective. I almost expected The Fourth Kind to be some sort of parody of TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Monster Quest. That could have been fun. Alas, I think it's meant to be taken seriously.

The dialogue is, by and large, never less than atrocious. It's all either overheated melodrama or clumsy and amateurishly delivered chunks of (generally useless) exposition. The acting is a notch better than the script deserved, but that's the best you can say for it. Jovovich proves once again why I just can't really take her seriously as an actress. Even a solid veteran like Patton sinks under the weight of this thing. Weirdly, the unknown actors in the archival segments are even worse, which destroys all but the thinnest thread of verisimilitude the movie might have otherwise had. The only person who emerges mostly unscathed is Koteas, who could probably infuse a reading of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the slithery charm of an Internet pederast.

The story ceases even trying to make sense after the first act, instead contenting itself to hopscotch from spooky scene to spooky scene with very little to offer in between. Osunsanmi tries to manufacture some sense of drama during the down time by having his actors either stare portentiously into the camera or scream at each other. It would be laughable if it wasn't so headache inducing.

There's not much more to say about this one. Just leave it alone. You deserve better.