DVD Reviews

The Fourth Kind - Blu-ray Review - CLIPS ADDED!

By Frankie Dees Mar 17, 2010, 15:18 GMT

In remote Alaska, citizens have been mysteriously vanishing since the 1960s. Despite multiple FBI investigations, the truth behind the phenomena had never been discovered—until now. While videotaping therapy sessions with traumatized patients, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) unwittingly exposes terrifying revelations of multiple victims whose claims of being visited by alien figures all share disturbingly identical details. Based on actual case studies, The Fourth Kind uses Dr. Tyler’s never-before-seen ...more

Hello, my name is Frankie Dees. What you are about to read is my accurate review of a film that retells the factual accounts of the mysterious disappearances and nightmares of the residents of Nome, Alaska in October of 2000.

Yeah, right, and if you believe the conceit behind this film, I got some archival footage of a Maryland witch and a San Diego haunting to show ya. This, of course, doesn’t mean the film isn’t any fun.

If you turn off all the lights, grab a few drinks and regress back to that gullible early teen mindset (the lucrative mindset that led to such surprising box office successes like “The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’), The Fourth Kind can be quite entertaining.

In fact, I would say this Joe Carnahan-produced (‘Narc’, upcoming remake of ‘The A-Team’) mock-doc thriller is a fair bit more effective than ‘Paranormal Activity’ - which steamrolled it in theaters this last fall. Upping the gimmick ante, writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi goes so far as to present this film as a History Channel-like doc which juxtaposes dramatic recreations with famous actors with the ‘real’ footage and audio recordings of the events that took place in Nome, Alaska.

So what is this about? Well, if the title doesn’t give it away, it deals with a subject matter that Spielberg failed to give us in three of his four otherworldly-centric pics – alien abduction! Close Encounters of the Third Kind is for wimps. S#&* just got real.

The opening frames see actress Milla Jovovich as herself, warning us that we are about to see is ‘extremely disturbing’, and that she will be playing real-life psychologist Abigail Tyler who takes up residence in Nome, AK.

We then see footage of the real Abigail Tyler being interviewed by director Olatunde Osunsanmi who is attempting to get her story behind what she believes are the numerous alien abductions and murders of Nome residents - including her husband.

As the out-of-it Doc Tyler recounts her story through filmed video footage and audio snippets of some her sessions with the Nome residents as well as police footage, the story then gets recreated with Jovovich and other actors such as Elias Koteas and Will Patton.

The fake scenes will sometimes be presented in split-screen with the real ‘footage’ to boost believability and, again, how all this ends up sitting with the viewer is dependent on how far they are willing to go down the rabbit hole with Osunsanmi’s moderately clever idea.

If the execution doesn’t quite match the idea, it’s the less than enthralling final moments that fail to provide that big payoff the viewer expects - i.e. going back to Jovovich’s opening statement that we will see things that are ‘extremely disturbing.’ In the end, we only get to ‘mildly disturbing’.

The tone and rural look of this pic is actually fairly close to the superior ‘Fire in the Sky’, a film that really was based on true events – the alleged abduction of an Arizona logger. That pic has a payoff. ‘The Fourth Kind’ seems to think that the gimmick is enough.

Remember that great moment in ‘Signs’ with the caught footage of an alien at a kid’s birthday party? No big f/x – just simple and chilling. I was really hoping for one of those moments that never really materialized. That said, there are some chilling moments in the pic, and the cast on both sides of the fictional coin definitely try to sell the material.

The 1080p AVC 2.35:1 encode is intentionally mixed as the ‘archival’ footage is of obviously poor resolution and problem-plagued. Damn those aliens! The recreated footage with our famous actors is quite good though with the beautiful rural locations of Alaska captured with exquisite high-def detail. The DTS-HD Master Aud track is also quite good and roars to life in certain sequences that might make you soil your shorts.

Special Features are disappointedly light which might be Universal’s continued effort to present this pic as real. We get about twenty minutes of ‘Deleted Scenes’ that were wisely cut. We also get Universal’s standard Blu features like ‘My Scenes’, ‘BD-Live’, ‘pocketBlu’ (iPhone, iPod functionality) and D-Box functionality.

I remember reviews being horrid for ‘The Fourth Kind’ upon its theatrical release, but I found it to be surprisingly entertaining despite dropping the ball when it needed to throw it in our face. Nevertheless, this wouldn’t be a bad rental for fans of this type of pic - particularly those taken with ‘Paranormal Activity’.