A Saturday Of Movies, i.e. I’ve been duped!

This is not something I’m willing to admit all the time, but this weekend I was duped by a movie. Now I’m fairly smart on how films are made, I can tell when something is fake or cheesy or trying to pass of trickery for reality. I grew up reading books and watching videos on how movie special effects are made and I’ve grown quite a knowledge base on how things work. This growing knowledge base has actually hindered me from completely enjoying some films, because I’m so caught up in figuring or pointing out how something on the screen was created.

Well this weekend I was duped by a movie, THE FOURTH KIND to be precise. I had only seen a few quick glimpses of the trailer for the film but never saw the movie while it was in theaters. Finally now available to rent, I sat down and watched it as part of a “things I’ve been meaning to watch” marathon. What hit me the most in the film was the “real footage” they showed along side of the re-enacted film. I wont give anything else away about the film but by the end of the movie, I was starting to get creeped out. It wasn’t the reenacted alien stuff, but rather in my head thinking that the footage being shown was all real. Stuff like that actually happening bothers me in some way and I got very unsettled by it for the rest of the weekend.

And then come Monday, I started looking into the film on my trusty old friend IMDB.com and I come to find out that Universal was sued by people in Alaska for fabricating lies about the town the movie was set in. Turns out, none of it was real. Nothing, nada, zippo. The truth was that the last 2 minutes of the movie did kind of make me second guess if what I was watching was real simply by the final “obvious hollywood camera track shot” during what was suppose to be a documented interview between two people. That shot would never had been used in an interview in that way, but still the rest of the film’s impact on me had made me second guess that single shot.

So yes, I admit, I had been duped into believing the movie was real and had actually happened. Now I know what it must have felt like for the people who thought BLAIRE WITCH was real, because in essence that’s what this film is. Just executed slightly better.