Fooled 'ya: 'Fourth Kind' uses Internet to trick moviegoers

"The Fourth Kind" takes its title from the sliding scale of alien encounters - sighting, evidence, contact and abduction.

Oh, those boorish extra terrestrials.

Haven't they skipped a few steps?

Shouldn't the fourth be drinks and dinner, the fifth cuddling, before we get to your place or mine?

"The Fourth Kind" comes at you with a clumsy come-on of its own - it's one of the virally marketed thrillers, in this case one that purports to address the mystery of deaths and disappearances around Nome, Alaska.

In the prologue, Milla Jovovich solemnly informs the audience that she's playing Abigail Tyler, a psychologist who treated Nome patients for repressed memories that, under hypnosis, reveal themselves to be . . . well, unpleasant.

Jovovich promises that wherever possible, the docudrama will be supplemented by actual footage of these sessions. The footage, we're told, is from Tyler's "archives." And that's how "Fourth Kind" plays out - Jovovich plodding earnestly through the role of crusading therapist, alongside a skeptical shrink (Elias Koteas) and a hostile sheriff (Will Patton), while director Olatunde Osunsanmi splices in footage of the "real" Tyler talking about her "actual" experiences.

"The Fourth Kind" is aimed at an audience eager to suspend disbelief, the kind of people who believed the "Blair Witch" footage was real because they wanted to believe it was real, because it was fun to play along.

For them, the studio marketing people have helpfully created Internet footprints for Abigail Tyler, now an invalid and recluse, we're told, living somewhere on the East Coast.

Movie critics and other hard-hearted cynics do not have to probe very deeply to find a publicity encounter of the second kind - evidence, online, that Osunsanmi is pulling an Orson Welles ("War of the Worlds," not "Citizen Kane").

The spoilers are there on the Internet, where true-believers can find The Hidden Truth, but where others can find the Anchorage Daily News and its withering assessment of the hoax behind the movie.

Withering, and a little depressing, since Nome has seen more than its share of missing and dead people, who deserve better than this kind of hucksterism.

Produced by Paul Brooks, Joe Carnahan, Terry Lee Robbins, written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, music by Atli Orvarsson, distributed by Universal Pictures.