The Fourth Kind

Posted In: Case 39

Oren Llewlyn says...

This movie scared the daylights out of me, the "achived" or "real" footage is disturbing. Now this is coming from some one that gets scared stupid when it comes to alien stuff. When the claimed "actual" footage was shown all of the hairs on my body were standing on end and for quite some time afteward. This movie is desputed as being fake and probably is, but honestly they had me sold for it being real. One things for sure hopefully I don't wake up at 3:30 A.M remebering this movie. Beyond a doubt I would recommend this to anyone. As for watching this one over and over, I will not be watching this one again not because it wasn't good but because it scared the hell out of me. One thing I would recommend is watching this one during the day and give yourself enough time to pick it apart after seeing it, unless you enjoy those really vivid dreams/nightmares.

Posted on November 28, 2010

Dante Alekna says...

THE FOURTH KIND is a brilliant movie full of all the right things.Many people have been put off by the film's style and methods. The movie is a slow burn; perhaps this is the problem some people have with it.Sometimes our society is unable to maintain their collective attention span unless they are spoon-fed action on a constant basis. THE FOURTH KIND has plenty of action but the build up to the climax is slow and anxiety driven. The acting is first rate and evokes a creepiness that most films can not even come close to. Whether or not one is na

Posted on November 28, 2010

Thersa Pepka says...

I will not go into plot/ storyline, you can read the other reviews with the plot layed out.



This is just my own opinion/ thoughts and review of the film.



What do I believe? The ending left more questions than answers in my opinion. I believe this movie was a very clever rouse by the filmmakers, in the vain ofBlair Witch, Paranormal Activity, Exorcism of Emily Rose, Fire in the Sky, The Mothman Prophecies making something that is said to be based on true events be not true at all or taking slightly the most sliver of truths and building a fictitious story around it, seen it done hundreds of times in books and movies. We do get Milla Jovovich in the beginning of the film stating that what we are about to see are reenactments of events mixed with "real" archival footage of interviews/ hypnosis sessions/of real people all experiencing some kind of UFO phenomena happening around Nome Alaska in Fall of 2000. Milla Jovovich portrays the Dr in the reenactments then through out we get interview snip- its of the real Dr. Tyler. A part of me wanted to believe this was real, but I would think if a noted Dr of Abigail Tyler's profession would have made this case go nationwide, and that Discovery or History Channel or Larry King would have aired some kind of special about UFO abductions and in particular about strange occurrences in and around Nome Alaska. And this definitely could have been an X Files episode, makes me wonder if the director's inspiration came from the X Files. And The supposedly real interviews and hypnosis sessions through out the movie do seem real and genuinely frightening/ disturbing.... and I don't want to forget the owls...never have owls seemed so other worldly spooky, and ghost like, some scenes the eyes seem to be piercing into your soul when it looks at you, in the movie there is a correlation with the owls and the conjectured other worldly Visitors, and the "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler looks ghostly, sickly, kinda creepy when she first shows up on the screen, we see her being interviewed by the director of this film to give it that realness. Some notable supporting roles: Will Patton, always a favorite of mine turns in a nice performance of the sheriff who doesn't believe in all this UFO mumbo jumbo crap, Elias Koteas as another Dr. friend of Dr. Tyler, gives a good steady performance as well, and Milla of course is great,a different role for her, more dramatic role, shows she's branching off.



I give credit to the over all tone of the movie and mood, and style, way it was filmed, mixing supposedly real footage and the reenactments with the actors, very good plot device. I just have to wonder how would said filmmakers get to clear all the red tape if in fact they were real footage of everything that Dr. Tyler did? But kudos to the filmmaker (Olatunde Osunsanmi)for giving us a genuinely frightening, astounding psychological thriller been awhile since I've had my nerves jangled like that. What bothers me is not knowing if any of this stuff is true??? Guess what I believe in the end is what I decide....

Posted on November 28, 2010

Trinidad Guziec says...

Ok, let's start by saying that all the people bashing this film for being "based on actual events" have apparently not seen a horror film since and including Tobe Hooper's epic "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Ever since horror films have used that label as a gimmick. That is all it is. Get over it. The Blair Witch doesn't exist. Kate and Mika from "Paranormal Activity" are alive and well. New York is not digging out from the Cloverfield monster. No humans died filming "Cannibal Holocaust." Get it? I digress.



The Fourth Kind is one of the most finely crafted thriller/horror films I have seen in a long time. The mix of "real" and "recreated" scenes is done really well. This film also succeeds in an area where so many have fallen flat: The Fourth Kind is actually scary. Imagine, and with a PG-13 rating and everything. The performances are well done. The special effects while minimal have terrific impact. This film does require suspension of disbelief and that seems to be where a lot of people get stuck. If you need to see everything that happens then you probably will not like The Fourth Kind. If you have a great imagination and you are able to play pretend for an hour and a half then you will get a big payoff. Also, as with most films, the less you know going in to the movie the better. Five stars.

Posted on November 29, 2010

Donita Campese says...

it's hard to find a horror type movie that holds your interest to the end. this movie did that for me. it pushes that idea of whether or not this could be a real thing. that's scary... enjoy!

Posted on November 30, 2010

Cathrine Mearse says...

Nome, Alaska, October 2000: Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) is a psychologist ministering to the citizens of Nome, a secluded Alaskan town which is only accessible by air. Still mourning the recent death of her husband, Tyler spends her days dealing with an apparent epidemic of insomnia amongst the town's citizens - but as Tyler delves deeper into the nature of her patient's sleep-related maladies, she begins to notice a disturbing number of similarities and correlations between their stories. Why are they all waking at 3:33am? And why are they all seeing owls outside their windows? As time draws on, she enlists the aid of colleague Dr. Abel Compos (Elias Koteas) and slowly begins piecing together fragments of information which suggest a nightmarish truth.



I'll admit it, "The Fourth Kind" caught me completely off guard; I rented it expecting a mildly entertaining mid-budget thriller fashioned after the likes of The X-Files: The Complete Collector's Edition and Steven Spielberg Presents Taken and instead experienced one of the most profoundly scary films that I've seen in a long time. This is no small praise when you consider that I've read a fair number of books and seen a fair number of films and TV shows about UFOs, aliens and abduction phenomena and am completely skeptical about the whole thing (the hard cold figures of Drake's equation negates the possibility of alien contact as far as I'm concerned).



While it's true that this film works through every Whitley Strieberesque clich

Posted on December 1, 2010

Colby Rugama says...

In a sea of garbage remakes.

A Nightmare on Elm St.

Friday the 13th. etc.....

If you are a part of American society that like the same old, recycled horror garbage spit out at you year after year than you will probably hate "The Fourth Kind".

If you're like me and you crave things that are new, original and don't rely on sound effects to scare the living daylights out of you than this movie is a gift from God (Aliens?).



The good?

Great acting.

Scared me more than any "slasher" movie has in years.

If you are a fan of the creepier aspects of The X Files then you'll love this movie.

Great pacing.

Great directing.

I cried at the end, and that's always a good thing for any movie to accomplish.

Rare, but good. :)



The bad?

It's hard to understand what is being said.

I know I have had a lot of problems with movies in the past.

Being unable to understand what is being said.

Can I provide you with a helpful hint that has helped me with many a movie where the dialog is spoken softly?

TURN ON THE SUBTITLES!!!

I know that this seems like a no brainer but I'm always surprised how few people realize how helpful a tool the subtitles are in a "softly spoken" movie.



Other than that, I have zero complaints about this film.

Genius from start to finish.

Original, scary and a great film.

Highly recommended!!!

Posted on December 1, 2010

Inge Sandelin says...

I love scary movies but as I get older, I have a harder time with them. Aliens in general are really what freak me out. I can't watch scary movies after a certain time of day, because they give me nightmares. Unfortunately for me, I watched this movie too late because I had low expectations and didn't expect it to scare me. The good news: no nightmares. The bad news: I was awake staring at the door in fear until the sun came up.



While I was pretty sure from the start that the claims of real life footage being in the movie were bogus, it still scared the crap outta me. But the promise of "archival footage" even though it really wasn't annoyed me, so I deducted some points for that.



It starts a little slow but once it gets going it's definitely a good scary movie in my opinion. For me, horror movies aren't about cinematic integrity, but how much they entertain and horrify you. This one fit the bill. Worth a watch(not a purchase), but don't watch it at night. Just a tip.

Posted on December 1, 2010

Raina Bemiss says...

This is one of the creepiest films I've seen in some time. As others have noted, it follows the convention that the producers have filmed a documentary & are fictionalizing it. At the beginning, lead actress Milla Jovovich walks out of a fog with an "explanation" of what is to come. Several times the film employs a split-screen device to show equivalent sequences from the supposed documentary. The effect is unnerving.



Background: Nome, Alaska has experienced a number of cases of persons gone missing (this appears to be true). Dr. Abigail Tyler (played by Jovovich), a psychologist getting over what she maintains was the murder of her husband, has devoted herself to continuing the project he was working on related to these disappearances. Through a number of interviews and hypnotic regression sequences she stumbles on the truth: aliens are abducting people from Nome; some are returned, some not. The visible manifestation of the aliens is a white owl outside one's bedroom window that stares in at you, unmoving, unafraid of you, sometimes remaining in one place for hours.



Dr. Tyler's hypnotic regressions get out of control as her subjects relive their harrowing experiences, sometimes severely injured as *something* seems to possess them. One of her subjects murders his family and then kills himself to escape the horror. Sheriff August (Will Patton) doesn't believe her talk of aliens and thinks something she is doing is causing these breakdowns and injuries. He believes she's delusional, having gone over the edge following what happened to her husband (turns out he wasn't murdered but committed suicide in front of her). But the aliens have turned their attention to Dr. Tyler herself. They "take" her daughter Ashley, already traumatized from losing her father...



A number of others writers have panned this movie. I thought its main devices worked remarkably well; I found myself wanting to hit the pause button and go into my office to "google" Abigail Tyler to find out if this was a real documentary. One of the purposes of sci-fi / horror is to get you, the viewer, to suspend your disbelief at least for the duration. This film does that. It is effective enough to have generated online discussions explaining how it worked, and that the "documentary" is part of an elaborate fictional device, and that the "real" Dr. Tyler was a different actress named Charlotte Milchard.



Overall, I found The Fourth Kind to be inferior to Fire in the Sky which has the weirdest and most disturbing sequence I ever saw in a UFO movie. There are a few faux pas IMHO. The film's events are set in October 2000, it says; yet the Nome of this film is awfully lush for that late in the year. Nome, Alaska has a hostile, Arctic climate; and I've never had the impression the surrounding area is as mountainous as it is portrayed here. (I've not been there; others can inform me if this is wrong; I won't mind.) Moreover, apparently the creators of the film went a bit overboard using made-up obits and invented news items that prompted legal action from the Alaska Press Club.



Be all this as it may, the film raises some interesting questions. What *did* happen to those people who vanished (ten just since 1990, according to Wikipedia)? While there is nothing to suggest the involvement of aliens, if they simply wandered off drunk and froze to death in the below-zero weather, their bodies would have been found eventually. As for UFOs and abductions: thousands of reliable witnesses have seen things in the sky no one can explain including trained observers: airline pilots, police officers, even astronauts. There are a handful of well documented cases of "missing time," as the literature calls gaps in people's memories ranging from hours to days. The above-mentioned Fire in the Sky dramatizes one such case. What happened? A Christian friend of mine says that UFOs and alien manifestations are the work of demonic forces, not alien intelligences. Whatever they may be, apparently they have been around for quite a while. Members of our culture with its fascination with technology and space travel see spaceships and aliens. Back in the 1800s it was airships. Centuries ago, people saw burning chariots in the sky. You can find them in the Old Testament (see Jeremiah 1). I didn't yet mention: the Fourth Kind beings, whatever they are supposed to be, spoke Sumerian and surely sounded demonic. The voices supposedly recorded by Dr. Tyler on tape make this not a film to watch before you go to bed at night! At least not before checking outside your bedroom window for unmoving white owls with large, staring eyes!



Maybe we don't want to know what's really up there. Maybe we just think we do.

Posted on December 2, 2010

Bonita Magsby says...

I thought parts of The Fourth Kind were interesting and will even admit that it gave me chills a couple of times, but I found myself thinking that most of the people claiming to have been abducted by little green men were either mentally disturbed, under the influence of alcohol or on some really freaky drugs. In fact, I just recently saw a show on one of the learning channels that talked all about the deadly combination of alcohol, the lack of daylight and the extreme cold of Nome, Alaska. The FBI even stated that the murders and missing people of Nome are attributed to this alone. Not that they would tell us the truth if aliens were really taking us in the middle of the night, but in this case it fits. On top of all this, I don't know if the "real" footage shown side by side with the actors was tampered with in any way. I also found it curious that it always went blurry or static when the really strange stuff would happen. If this footage has really been around for 9 years, it would have hit YouTube long ago. There was one bit of convincing footage (from a police officer's camera mounted on the dash of his car) that showed a dark craft of some kind flying over the house the same night the main character's little girl was abducted, or so she says. You can hear in the tape that the cop saw the UFO and says that he can see "them" taking the child.



The acting is fairly good. Milla Jovovich ditches her action heroine persona and delivers a decent performance, but Will Patton goes way over the top as the town sheriff and he seems out of place. As expected the people in the "real" footage are more convincing because they aren't acting for a future audience.



This will get a lot of comparisons to Paranormal Activity and the studio is probably wishing they released The Fourth Kind a couple of months before, but anyone interested in UFOs, alien abductions or just want to explore the unknown, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes. The Truth is Out There.

Posted on December 6, 2010