First off, I want to address the knuckleheads out there in the blogosphere who are still talking about the “archival footage” in this movie as if it were authentic. It’s not. Everything about this movie has been 100% debunked, most effectively by Kyle Hopkins, an investigative journalist in Nome, Alaska. What’s kinda fucked up is that over the years, there have been a rash of disappearances in and around Nome – “mainly people traveling to the hub city from surrounding Inupiat and Siberian Yupik villages” – and that’s the basis of the movie. As Hopkins explains:

Families suspected a serial killer. The FBI mostly blamed alcohol and the cruel Alaska winter. This fall, a movie distributed by a major studio and marketed as a “dramatization” of real events is offering another explanation for decades of disappearances and suspicious deaths in and around Nome: Abduction by space aliens.

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi caught wind of these mysterious incidents and made an alien abduction movie around them. That’s all. And seriously, if any kind of revelatory paranormal movie actually was made up of “archival footage,” either the government would prevent its release or if by some miracle a studio did get its paws on it, the rights would be sold for about a billion dollars and the news would be covered on every media outlet in existence.

So, The Fourth Kind – forget all the bullshit, it’s just a really entertaining movie and your best bet out of all the other flicks coming out this weekend. Knowing that the movie is a hoax doesn’t take away from its appeal in any way.

The movie mixes dramatic reenactments, starring Mila Jovovich as Dr. Abigail Tyler, and the “archival footage,” including interviews, police car reels, and audio recordings. Frequently, split screens of the archival and dramatic footage are shown in sync, and I found myself way more interested in the “archival” footage than Mila’s face (see: above). She’s a pretty miserable actress who is strangely watchable at the same time. The film involves much deeper, familial material than Mila is capable of pulling off, but at the same time, she’s really attractive. So there’s that.

A lot of people are bitching about the archival footage, but I honestly thought those parts were dope and more watchable than Mila’s shit. The body distortion and Sumerian barks were fucking fantastic, and a really unique touch for an exhausted genre.

I don’t really want to touch on the spoilers, and a lot of them are visual, so let’s do so in the comments. Also, has there ever been a more frightening abduction movie than Fire in the Sky?

On the subject of alien abduction, I recently saw the documentary I Know What I Saw, on the History Channel. This is required viewing for anyone interested in aliens, and features real archival footage (visual/audio) of close encounters.

The Fourth Kind comes out tomorrow, nationwide.