io9.com accuses The Fourth Kind of being an unsuccessful hoax

The new movie The Fourth Kind tries to blur reality in the same way that movies such as Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project have successfully done. But according to io9.com, The Fourth Kind doesn't manage to pull it off convincingly:

Alien abduction flick The Fourth Kind bills itself as containing "actual footage" from case histories. But this footage is so poorly faked that it insults the audience's intelligence...
The movie stumbled out of the gate by hanging most of its fear power on a fundamental dishonesty. There is no "archival footage." There are no "actual case studies." Instead, we get badly-acted, blatantly fake documentary footage which fuzzes out whenever anything alien happens...
I'm not against fake documentaries. I loved Paranormal Activity, which was effective because the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie's "documentary" evidence.
What pushes Fourth Kind from the merely bad into the actually insulting was the filmmakers' insistence that the documentary evidence was real. Actors from the "documentary" portions of the movie are uncredited, and many media outlets are still reporting that the footage is real.

I'll probably see it anyway (on dvd). My standards for horror movies are pretty low.

(Thanks, Joe!)

Entertainment

Posted on Thu Nov 05, 2009



Comments

I am shocked, shocked, to hear that a movie about alien abductions might contain faked footage.
Posted by Big Gary  on  Thu Nov 05, 2009  at  09:09 PM
Last Broadcast is the daddy of these kind of films.
Posted by Mr R  on  Fri Nov 06, 2009  at  02:20 AM
You forgot one of the all-time champions in this category of movies that "tries to blur reality in the same way that movies such as Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project have successfully done" - JFK, starring Kevin Costner... Just my take on the subject...
Posted by Christopher  on  Sun Nov 08, 2009  at  07:19 PM
Saw this film, wasn't so bad. Could have been better. I looked up the movie and found out it was fake, my friends still believe it was real....
Posted by G  on  Sat Dec 12, 2009  at  02:22 PM
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