The Fourth Kind ( **1/2 )

November 5, 2009 3:49 p.m. EST

98 minutes

In theaters November 6, 2009

Rating: PG-13, Thriller

There is, apparently, no place like Nome.

Not if you buy what's being sold by the tingly horror thriller, The Fourth Kind, which believers will find to be upsetting, while detractors dismiss it as half-baked (or just plain faked) Alaska.

As Steven Spielberg reminded us in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first kind of alien encounter is a sighting, the second is evidence, and the third is contact. Now we add another card to the deck: the fourth kind, which involves alien abduction.

The Fourth Kind is a horror thriller about alien abduction, all right, but there's nothing kind about it. It's based on "actual case studies," as they say.

Hmmm. Maybe.

The unusually structured pseudo-documentary tries to show us actual footage and reenacted footage of the same events in order to convince us that what's being depicted here is not being made up.

Hmmm. Maybe.

Milla Jovovich plays Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist who has relocated from the Carolinas to remote Nome, Alaska, where she conducted a series of sleep disorder case studies in 2000. What the therapist discovered was that many of her patients, while under hypnosis, described events and occurrences that were eerily, unexplainably similar in their particulars. Evidence that there were actually abductions kept mounting up.

Dr. Tyler investigated the phenomenon and discovered a history of multiple witnesses reporting nearly identical details: folks would, for example, wake up paralyzed, hearing blood-curdling noises just before unknown assailants pulled them kicking and screaming from their bedrooms.

In addition, a disporportionate number of people -- given the size of Nome's population -- has been reported missing over the last 40 or so years. Yet, despite multiple FBI investigations into the matter, the truth has remained tantalizingly elusive.

So we watch these real folks describing their ordeals and we watch actors portray them and tell the same stories.

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi (WithIN), who co-wrote the story with Terry Lee Robbins, incorporates alleged actualities into the proceedings, and often splits the screen, using this "never-before-seen archival footage" alongside reenactment footage. The juxtaposition of the actual and the staged certainly has the effect of making the real stuff look that much more real by comparison, but it's still not enough to erase our doubts about its authenticity.

We can, in other words, enjoy being frightened even when we're not accepting what's being paraded in front of us as authentic.

Which is why director Osunsanmi makes sure to include a number of generic -- and admittedly effective -- jump scares along the way that the film's audience is sufficiently on the edge of their seats to be more than receptive to, to say the least.

Once you leave the theater, however, the power of this film to disturb starts dissipating almost immediately as the realization that you've been snookered becomes more and more clear. But that's later.

At the top, star Jovovich as herself and director Osunsnami as himself appear before us to explain that it's up to us to decide if what we are about to watch is real or not.

So, does the film convince us of the existence of extraterrestrial life? No way. But does it disturb us as we watch? You're darn tootin'.

The Fourth Kind is a shamelessly manipulative and perhaps terribly dishonest but nonetheless creepy and unnerving we're-not-alone chiller, one that successfully abducts its impressionable and easily-spooked audience.