The Fourth Kind: Critic Reviews

Too often, The Fourth Kind makes the paranormal look disappointingly normal.

May be humorless, paranoid nonsense, but its biggest failure is its inability to scare.

You don't have to believe in far-fetched tales of mysterious beams of light and alien abductions to get caught up in The Fourth Kind.

At a recent preview screening, the most common audience response to this nonsense was laughter, not gasps of horror.

A couple of modestly effective shocks lie in store, but none as frightening as the onscreen text informing us that some 11 million people claim to have seen a UFO.

Badly acted by everyone (including the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, who appears onscreen), this insipid jumble's idea of fright is incessant screaming.

Mr. Osunsanmi's chutzpah exceeds his skill.

Why the aliens chose this community of 9,261 to abduct so many people is a mystery. Also why owls stare into bedroom windows.

Olatunde Osunsanmi's big formal innovation tunrs out to be the split-screen pairing of patently bogus "archival" black-and-white video that shows alleged abductees undergoing hypnosis and color "reenactments" of same.

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

The Fourth Kind is legitimately scary enough to keep you in your seat. (Just don't Google the flick before you see it.)

Unintentionally, laughably bad.

Universal's alien-abduction thriller none too cleverly bids to pass off mock-documentary footage of levitating psychological patients--and, scarier still, ordinary talking heads--as the real deal.

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

Without the true-story conceit, The Fourth Kind would be just another formula horror flick with a couple of passable jolts trying to hold a flimsy story together.

The mission here is to demonstrate how, in this explosive age of dubious information, cynicism can be quickly trumped by gullibility.

Not entirely uninteresting, but it suffers from some ill-advised decisions. In fact, the film's "hook" may be its greatest detraction.

This stiff paranormal thriller could stand a lot more activity.

The flat-lining, alien-abduction thriller The Fourth Kind offers a close encounter that buries an interesting idea under a barrage of gimmicky, carnivallike hokum.

You'd do better downloading an old Art Bell show -- say, the one about the guy who put an alien in his freezer -- than investigating this evidence of subnormal activity.

Writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi attempts an Orson Welles-like confluence of "real" and imagined that might have worked had he gotten out of the way more, literally and figuratively.

[The] ostensible archival footage proves so clunky and transparently phony that the entire gimmick collapses.

If there were a low point of viral movie marketing last decade, consider "The Fourth Kind" the Marianas Trench. The title refers to four levels of alien interaction, and the pedestrian plotting on display proved Steven Spielberg stopped at the right one.