Time for another "Crypticpsych Not-Quite-Horror Quick Review"!

As I mention in my review of Splice, I am a scientist when not reviewing horror movies.  I look for proof in most things and science in general does fascinate me.  UFOs and aliens do too, though I'm not the kind of person who believes in mass government coverups and conspiracy theories.  In fact, with most psuedoscience and paranormal investigation, what fascinates me most is the psychology of the people who believe it as, in most cases, I don't believe them myself.  Documentaries about that sort of thing, while they might be interesting as a one-off or a quick watch on a rainy day (if done well) BARELY fit into the horror genre if at all.  Which brings us to todays topic:

What we have here is the upcoming (March 22, 2011) release of Reality Entertainment's UFOs Do Not Exist!:  The Grand Deception and Cover Up of the UFO Phenomenon.  Now, I'm not going to sit here and claim that it's impossible for aliens to exist or anything of the sort.  This isn't the forum and I'm not the person to disabuse people who believe they've been abducted by aliens or that they exist of their opinions.  But what I can do is critique this COMPLETELY non-horror documentary as a film... and I have to say that, in that light, this is the worst documentary I've ever seen.

Now then, the movie itself...and barely one at that.  What we basically have here is a slideshow that lasts TWO HOURS LONG (though the box seems to think it's 250 minutes long... )and basically is pictures flicking by (at times repeating themselves) while music plays in the background and the maker of the documentary speaks over them.  There are a lot of ways this can fail right off the bat, and this falls into every one.

1)  It's one thing to make a slideshow into a documentary... it's another to do it blandly.  There is no title card, it's just two-hours of nonstop photos and a couple short video clips.  Bland, dull, boring.

2)  If you ARE going to do that, you HAVE to have a charismatic narrator.  This does not.  His name is Bill Knell and he's been collecting info for years.  He sometimes gets drowned out slightly by the music, he stumbles over his words, and he has a mildly annoying habit of popping his "p's" and whistling his "c's" and "s's".

3)  I didn't actually think it was possible to mess up sound editing on something as simple as this, but somehow, the movie has a habit of apparently cutting out things Knell is saying with no explanation.  Lines just end in mid sentence as if he badly edited out a flub of some sort.

4)  I'd also love it if Knell didn't plug other DVDs he's done twice during the two-hour run time.  That'd be nice.

Now, let's talk content.  If this piece focused solely on Roswell and Area 51 and another decently verifiable government experiment called "The Philadelphia Experiment"... I'd be more kind to it.  He backs up those ideas with newspaper clippings, eyewitness accounts, etc.  That's how you make a documentary.  Some of the better parts of it are in this vein:  Roswell discussions; talks he had with Jackie Gleason, Richard Nixon, and Walter Cronkite; discussion of government responses to various phenomena.

It's when the narrator's OPINIONS creep in that the film goes off the rails.  Two claims leap out at me:  1) He claims that the Nazis in WW2 were using technology they couldn't have developed since we didn't until years later, thus they HAD to be getting UFO help (yes, I'm serious, that's his only justification for that remark), and 2) In a moment that is near-OFFENSIVE in its stupidity, he discusses a government time-travel experiment and claims a person was cast forward into a devastated city before returning.  Then, ON HIS OWN, he makes the conclusion that the guy had to have leaped forward to 9/11 and his justification....is that a horse statue the person claimed they saw there was actually a sculpture that LOOKS NOTHING LIKE A HORSE that he claims the guy mistook for a horse because of confusion from the time travel (It actually looks like a giant apple...so if I'm ever that disoriented, i'd like to be taken to an asylum, please).  When you put things THAT off-the-wall in this, you hurt the overall product's impact because, if you buy the good stuff in the piece, you now also are implicitly buying the bad.

Overall, this piece deserves 1 freak head out of 5.  Given to a more charismatic narrator, axing out the completely off-the wall stuff, and making it more than just an interminably long slideshow, it could probably make for a compelling piece.  As it is, it's stunningly bland, boring, poorly handled, and nearly unwatchable.  And it CERTAINLY has next to nothing to do with horror.

Until next time, this is Crypticpsych saying, the truth may, in fact, be out there, but if it is, I DO NOT want this guy telling me it.

SEE THE TRAILER FOR UFOS DO NOT EXIST IN THE OSSUARY TRAILER GALLERY!