[horcrux2007]

Amalthea inspired me to watch The Fourth Kind, so I did.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

It's always a bit fun when a found footage movie affirms to be real footage and sticks with that claim throughout the film. You get to play along with the filmmakers and hopefully get a satisfying horror flick out of it. Movies like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project did this well, but some movies are a bit too ardent about their authenticity and come off as silly. The Fourth Kind fits somewhere in the ladder category. In The Fourth Kind, the town of Nome, Alaska is plagued by mysterious disappearances, murders and suicides in the early 2000's. A psychologist, Abbey Taylor, head hypnosis sessions with various patients whose stories seem to have distinct similarities, and Abbey realizes that she might be tormented by the same thing that afflicts her patients. The film mostly mixes found footage with dramatized versions of the footage, sometimes showing the "real" and dramatized portions side-by-side. For the most part, it's just aggravating. You'll hear the same dialog from two different actors at the same time on occasion, which begs the question why they didn't either go all-in with the found footage. The found footage scenes are the most intense parts of the films. Not necessarily scary, but they are visceral enough to be memorable. The dramatized scenes are melodramatic and dull. Surprisingly, the movie would have been much better if it was completely found footage. The Fourth Kind has some effective stretches here and there, but it's mostly a half-baked affair.

5/10