text: The Fourth Kind (out of 4) Starring Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton. Written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi. 98 minutes. At Elgin Mills, Empire North York. 14A 
   
   E.T. phone Nome. 
   
   The makers of The Fourth Kind would have you believe the Alaska town is such a hotbed of alien activity, abductions, evil goings-on and general weirdness you'll finally be able to stop looking for an explanation for Sarah Palin. 
   
   Written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi (The Cavern), we're told the movie is a re-enactment of so-called real events documented by Alaska psychologist and hypnotherapist Dr. Abigail Tyler as she delved into her patients' freakish mass sleeplessness. 
   
   How could they get any shut-eye with menacing aliens scooping them up from their beds, doing horrible things to them and then erasing their memories? 
   
   Borrowing heavily from The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity – with Bulgaria standing in for Alaska – Osunsanmi makes the most of his manufactured reality, while the interviews with hypnotized abductees screaming like banshees and levitating off beds helps to up the creepy ante and introduces a couple genuine scares. 
   
   Milla Jovovich (the Resident Evil series) opens the film by explaining she will play Tyler. The "real" Tyler, portrayed by an uncredited hollow-eyed actress, gives a running interview to filmmaker Osunsanmi to further the story. 
   
   "Every scene in this movie is supported by archived footage," Jovovich intones in a performance so deadpan you want to occasionally check for a pulse. 
   
   Under hypnosis, Tyler's patients explain they all see a smiling owl hanging around the bed when they inexplicably wake in the night, a portent that something brutal and horrific is about to happen to them. 
   
   There's much screaming and thrashing by her patients and Will Patton is especially over-the-top as the local sheriff who's had just about enough of this paranormal nonsense. 
   
   Using split and multi screens, we watch the "real" grainy, scratchy footage of the hypnotized patients in Exorcist-like contortions (even the owl can swivel its head 360 degrees), while the actors re-enact their versions of events. 
   
   Therapist Tyler has her own problems. She's convinced her husband was murdered, her daughter has gone blind, her pre-teen son hates her and, after hearing mysterious, demonic voices on a tape recording and finding an odd wound on her body, she's convinced she was abducted, too. 
   
   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 title refers to the close encounters sliding scale – thanks to Steven Spielberg we know what the third kind is: alien contact. The fourth kind is being kidnapped by these off-world beings. 
   
   And then there's the fifth kind – movies that have no original ideas and abduct someone else's. ||||| Simon Vesrano / Universal Pictures 
   
   C 
   
   Review in a Hurry: Actress Milla Jovovich, in the role of Actress Milla Jovovich, hosts an odd mashup of supposedly "found" footage and reenacted scenes featuring herself and other name actors as they tell us a dubious and occasionally scary "true" story involving UFO abductions in Nome, Alaska, (as portrayed herein by a town in Bulgaria). 
   
   The Bigger Picture: If DreamWorks had proceeded with its one-time-rumored big-budget remake of Paranormal Activity, it might have gone something like this. Breathe your sighs of relief now. Paranormal found its audience, while The Fourth Kind, despite its periodic strengths, does its very best to take the viewer out of the material rather than immersing one in the story. 
   
   Milla introduces herself to us while standing in a forest and proceeds to show us footage of a psychologist named Abigail Tyler being interviewed by the movie's writer-director, a Joe Carnahan protégé named Olatunde Osunsanmi. She talks about strange disappearances in Nome, Alaska, and odd cases she had. 
   
   Cut to a much more expensive-looking set, and Jovovich, now playing the role of Dr. Tyler, as she places patients under hypnosis and hears their scary tales. Each time a new actor shows up—and these include Will Patton and Elias Koteas—onscreen titles helpfully tell us their names, and who they're playing. Then every so often, we go back and forth between the dramatization and the "real" people being interviewed. Sometimes there's a split-screen and both are shown at once. 
   
   If this had much basis in fact, perhaps there'd be a point to all this, but if the blatant horror-movie makeup on the face of "Dr. Abigail Tyler" (billed only thus in the end credits) doesn't trigger your BS detector in the very first scene, then you just haven't seen many movies. 
   
   Had this been done entirely as either a mock-doc or an X-Files-type thriller, rather than an awkward hybrid, it would have a chance. As is, it's hard to relate to actors when the movie keeps reminding you that's what they are. 
   
   On the other hand, despite the artifice, Jovovich turns in a bold performance that shows she can do more than just kick undead creatures in the head—it may be her finest acting to date. And there are constant scares, often cheap ones but still effective. 
   
   This is where letter grades break down—we'd like to give Milla and the jump moments an A, but apply an F to the whole conception of the thing and the unbelievability of the fake footage. Consider our C grade to be the average of those two scores. 
   
   The 180—a Second Opinion: If you take along a date who's likely to jump into your arms at the slightest soundtrack sting, this could be the perfect movie. 
   
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   There's so much else to see, too—have a look in our Totally New Releases gallery!
target: – The Fourth Kind attempts to combine dramatization of true events and fake-documentary alien abductions in Alaska, and falls horribly flat. Here's what critics are saying: The ludicrousness of the grainy archival footage, presented as "real," and a lousy performance by Milla Jovovich, whose "notion of serious acting seems to be speaking very slowly in a halting monotone," make it hard to suspend your disbelief, writes Stephen Holden for the New York Times. Luke Thompson of E! Online finds the film's framing device peculiar: "Every so often, we go back and forth between the dramatization and the 'real' people being interviewed. Sometimes there's a split-screen and both are shown at once. It's hard to relate to actors when the movie keeps reminding you that's what they are." "Without the true-story conceit," writes Linda Barnard for the Toronto Star, "the Fourth Kind would be just another formula horror flick with a couple of passable jolts trying to hold a flimsy story together."