My name is Robert Anhalt and what you are about to read is real. I recently sat down to watch the "biopic" on alien abductions, The Fourth Kind.

I don't know about anyone else, but I know that this is definitely not a documentary and/or biopic. It's a completely fictional story about alien abductions, and not very good ones at that.

Mila Jovovich opens as herself and attempts to convince the audience that everything they are about to witness is either real or adaptations of real events. The entire film is a blend of known actors portraying roles and acting out what appears to be a narrative, with spliced in "real footage" from patient interviews and cop car cameras. The real footage adds captions, strange sound effects and even manufactured distortion to make it seem like something (extraterrestrial) is interfering with the recording. Dr. Abigail Tyler (Jovovich) interviews psychiatric patients who display symptoms of "alien abduction", the fourth kind of close encounters, while being part of the mystery herself. The patients recall vivid dreams, scream in horror and even channel alien voices under hypnosis - luckily on camera, otherwise we wouldn't believe it.

Where the movie really goes wrong is that it's not even a narrative. It's not a documentary. It's not a biopic. It's not even a fraction of these things. Writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi must have had his own encounter with craziness to believe that this was a good idea. The whole thing occurs in Alaska, where no one is going to look up the so-called "documented" cases of alien encounters. The names were changed from the original victims, but making it Alaska inserts a futility that would not be felt if it was encounters in New York City.

Within the first third of the movie, one of Dr. Tyler's patients holds his family at gunpoint and commits murder/suicide, visualized with a mix of re-enactment, actual footage and Dr. Tyler's perspective, all in a 24-esque split screen. This unique, albeit confusing style, is never repeated in the movie, which makes it horribly inconsistent. It's downright difficult to call it a movie because it has no structure. At some point, Tyler pieces together that the alien language spoken by patients is actually ancient Sumerian, which hints at an alien presence on Earth 8,000 years ago. It's very Stargate in that it wants to imply an alien presence in ancient cultures, but does it at the level of a bad History-channel documentary.

I'm truly sorry that I actually watched this twice. It's an awful movie that has nothing going for it besides some slightly disturbing "real" interviews. This is not how you get people interested in close encounters again. If this is any attempt to garner attraction to this pseudo-science, much like ghost EVPs did after all those TV shows and movies, then Olatunde Osunsanmi should have taken either a cinematic or documentary approach, not both. It infringes on my enjoyment of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and will never see the light of day again. Good night, you piece of trash film.