a Primal Root review

Watch out Nome Alaska! You are being besieged by evil Owliens who are attacking you in your sleep, taking you to spaceships, probing you and erasing your memories. For what purpose? I guess so you can kill yourself and your family? But that doesn’t matter! This is some scary shit and  it’s ALL REAL and we have tons of audio and visual footage to support this case!

Yeah…

I really don’t know where to begin…the obviously faked “real” footage? The terrible performances? The sloppy script? The hackneyed editing? The strange decision to break some segments up into layered four framed split screen? The Fourth Kind is the kind of Trash Cinema it just hurts to sit through.

What I saw did disturb me. Probably not in the way the filmmakers intended.

The film opens just like the trailer with Milla Jovovich looking into the camera and spinning around the woods informing us that what we are about to see is 100% real and based on real accounts by real people in the real town of Nome Alaska and you will be “really” disturbed. She fails to mention that her acting skills are completely fake.

"I Has Serious Face."

The Fourth Kind features Milla (Resident Evil) Jovovich as the allegedly “real” psychologist, Abbey Tyler. Abbey’s husband was murdered sometime before the beginning of the film and she is left a widow raising their tweenage son and little daughter who went blind after Daddy kicked the bucket. (Huh?) Through her clients Abbey begins to uncover some kind of  epidemic of really scary owl spottings through hypnosis sessions which she video tapes. These tapes are used to annoy the shit out of the audience during split screen segments featuring the “real” footage and the reenacted footage. Sometimes featuring four shifty frames alternating between shots and moving all over the screen. I am all for edgy editing but, man, when one shot is just a shot of a patrol car’s lights flashing how do you justify this decision?  This is just poor filmmaking.

Anyhoo, soon after one hypnosis session goes hilariously awry (Freak out and hoping over the couch breaking a table)  the patient promptly goes home, murders his family and himself in a standoff with the police. Abbey’s professional, rational, intelligent explanation? The Owliens are responsible. That’s right…Owls from outer space… And she ain’t gonna stop till she gets to the bottom of it, by golly!

Abbey harming one of her many patients.

So she puts some more patients through horrible hypnosis sessions where they end up either dead or scarred for life. Soon she is contacted by an Owlien and has no recollection of it other than what she taped on her hand held tape recorder that I am sure she was planning to send to Diane over at FBI headquarters to inform her that “The Owls are Not What They Seem.”

I get the feeling someone was watching their Twin Peaks box set when they wrote this sucker.

So, uh, we eventually find our the aliens speak Sumerian and really have no agenda other than abducting people and scaring the shit out of them. Abbey goes through her own gut bustingly funny hypnosis session in the hopes to get her daughter back from the evil Owliens. Abbey air humps off of the couch, unhinges her jaw and starts shouting Sumerian about God and the truth. Be warned, the footage of Abbey going all whacky is screwed up and hardly visible. Which is a shame because it looks highly entertaining. The Fourth Kind has the irritating habit of building up to something really cool and then cutting to the “real” footage which is all messed up and hardly visible. See, at least the Demon in Paranormal Activity knew not to fuck with the tapes! These Owleins are just assholes!

Speaking of assholes, the Owliens have some probing to do! Abbey, meet my friend Ben Dover.

By the film’s end there are no answers, which is fine with me, but after two hours there’s no real conclusion either. The film just kind of stops. The scariest thing in the film is the face of the woman who is supposed to be the “real” Abbey Tyler who is interviewed throughout the film. I laughed through this entire movie but anytime the movie cut to the “real” Abbey and quieted down I got scared. Her face is horrifying and I kept waiting in suspense for an Owlien to rip out of her face or something to give us one final jump scare. Alas, she is just creepy looking and that’s all.

"I need to find a better agent."

The Fourth Kind actually resembles something one might create out of scrapped pieces of film found in a dumpster. There are some talented people involved here including character actors Will Patton and Elias Koteas but they are given next to nothing to work with. Koteas plays one of Abbey’s friends and fellow psychologists by the name of Abel Campos. His main purpose in the film is to set up the compact little Sony camcorder, look smug and be skeptical. Patton plays the local Sheriff  who realizes all this Owlien stuff is complete bullshit and Abbey is just totally crazy. I got the feeling the Sheriff is meant to be the villain figure of the piece but I couldn’t help but root for the guy. Abbey is obviously two nuggets short of a Happy Meal and an endangerment to her chilrden and her patients.

Some of the "real" footage.

But no amount of supporting cast talent could save this film. It’s just terrible. Maybe if the filmmakers had decided to go with either all filmed footage or fake “real” footage the movie would have been better than trying to fit both into one feature film. The result is muddled, confusing and pretty boring. The Fourth Kind is a film that not only falls short of hitting the bullseye, it flies past the board, off the brick wall and impales itself in the eye of the audience. It’s a vehicle without a map and a completely shit faced driver behind the wheel. It’s inept, stupid, pointless, plotless and has as many redeeming qualities as Spider-Man 3. Seriosuly. It’s that bad.

The Eyes of the Owlien.

I cannot recommend The Fourth Kind to anyone but the bravest and most tolerant of us Trash Collectors. I’ve seen more than my share of poorly made Trash Cinema and I can find redeeming qualities in just about all of them. But in the case of The Fourth Kind it simply feels like a cheap, half hearted attempt at making something similar to The Blair Witch Project and we had to endure one of those already this year. I got a few chuckles out of the melodrama and the goofy abduction scenarios but I spent most of the movie looking at Jess and wondering how much longer could they possibly drag this movie out? Will this ever end? Is this real life?

The Fourth Kind is a failure of the First Order. None of it works, none of it sticks, it’s not mindlessly fun, and it’s not even worthy of being called Trash Cinema. This is just pure cinematic monkey spunk.

Stay Trashy,

-The Primal Root

Milla Jovovich. Much hotter than The Fourth Kind.