This Friday sees the release of The Fourth Kind, a movie alleging to be a reenactment of documented footage of alien abduction victims. A quick inspection reveals that the movie is made up of approximately 5% truthiness, 95% lying-ass-iness. The doctor being played by Mila Jovovich, the patients being played by a who’s-who of respectable C-listers, turns out they’re not real, just fictional characters. In a movie of all things–who would’ve thought? Seriously, look it up.

Really this doesn’t matter, the movie still looks fairly interesting, but it’s important to arm yourself with this knowledge when the chubby political/conspiracy nut you work with tries to use the movie as evidence to support his alien invasion theories. Now, instead of suffering through his bizarre sermon, you can cut him short by saying, “For starters, Paul, don’t talk to another man in the company bathroom under any circumstances. Secondly, your ideas are crap. The Brand New Cool told me so.”

With that established, here are 4 more flicks that apparently believe “Based on Actual Events” is the same as saying “Based Almost Entirely on Stuff Someone Just Made the Fuck Up.”

4 – The Haunting in Connecticut

Based On…

A Connecticut family moves to a new house so their son can be closer to the hospital where he receives treatment. Soon the son starts having visions and supernatural encounters that eventually spread to the rest of the family.  Based on the true story of paranormal activities experienced by the Snedeker family in the 1980s.

…Lies!

Hell, even the guy who wrote the book that the story’s based on knew it was nonsense even as he researched the material.

“They just couldn’t keep their stories straight,” the author said of the family. When he asked the “paranormal investigators” on the scene, Ed and Lorraine Warren, about whether or not the family might actually just be crazy alcoholics making stories up for attention, Ed and Lorraine basically told the him, “Of course they’re crazy, they think they’re seeing ghosts and shit!”

So, to recap, Hollywood made a lying-ass adaptation of a lying-ass book about some stuff that didn’t really happen. I once was in a grocery store and saw something labeled “Imitation Bacos,” which is interesting because actual Bacos are labeled as “Imitation bacon.” This movie is a lot like that.

3- Hidalgo

Based On…

The honest-to-goodness adventure of cowboy Frank Hopkins and his horse Hidalgo as they enter and win an incredible endurance race called the Ocean of Fire in Arabia, all while battling assassins and wooing royal women.

…Lies!

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to lying about things you’ve done:

1)Say something believable and harmless enough to make no one care about researching whether its true or not.  (“I once made it to Contestant’s Row on the Price is Right, but never made it up on stage.”)

2) Make up something so ridiculous that it’s almost impossible to prove it didn’t happen. (“I was backpacking through rural Thailand and saw some bad guys trying to sacrifice some villagers to an enormous bear. I was able to use a broken tusk from an elephant’s skeleton as a weapon to save the villagers, and they were so grateful that all the women came together to gift me with their customary 7 Nights of Unimaginable Lovemaking. They made me swear to never reveal the location of the village though, so…”).

Hidalgo is an example of the latter. Frank Hopkins was a guy who told “tall tales” back when it was a lot easier to get away with–before the internet and ubiquity of cameras meant that footage of the humiliating things that really happened to you in Thailand is likely to pop up on Youtube. Needless to say, not only did Frank Hopkins almost certainly lie about the race he claimed to win, but he also lied about what race he claimed for his ancestry (Native American). His horse was probably a mule or something too.

2- Primeval

Based On…

The shocking story of the world’s most prolific serial killer. With over 300 victims to his name, he remains at large, killing unabated.

…Lies!

It’s quite literally a “croc.” As in crocodile. Tthe advertising for the movie deliberately set out to make potential film goers believe it was a movie about a decidedly human killer with a body count that looks like an area code. In reality it’s (just partly) about a man-eating crocodile called Gustave that has killed quite a few (but a lot less than three-hundred) locals in his native Africa. I am not making this up.

This movie doesn’t just take liberties with terms like “serial-killer” and “true story,” it wantonly ignores any sense of honesty. It lies about the species of the killer, exaggerates the number of victims, and then doesn’t even fully focus on the killer–instead splitting time with a warlord who arguably is the major villain of the story. If lying was an Olympic event Primeval would test positive for several banned substances and get kicked out of the Olympic village on the first night. Fuck’s sake…

1- The Amityville Horror (2005 Remake)

Based On…

A movie that’s based on a book that was established as being complete bullshit over a decade ago.

…Lies!

So, you know how I referenced Ed and Lorraine Warren with the Haunting in Connecticut? Well, coincidence of coincidences, they’re the same “paranormal investigators” who helped the Lutzes find out that their house in Amityville was possessed by demons. Or something, who the hell knows anymore.  The only true aspect about the stories is that a guy named Ronald Defeo did indeed kill his family in that house. The rest of it was bullshit that the Lutzes invented while sipping wine with Defeo’s attorney.

If I got into all of the evidence that the rest of the story is fabricated this post would double in size: just type the words “Amityville Hoax” into Google and watch your screen get flooded with results.

But the kicker here is that the 2005 remake deviated from the hoax so much that the original hoaxer, George Lutz, wanted to sue the filmmakers. I guess his argument was, “My story might have been a lie, but it wasn’t a gotdamn lie like this new movie is.” If The Haunting in Connecticut is imitation fake truth, the Amityville Horror remake is like making a clone of a Bizarro Superman impostor. It’s like a scientific experiment to see how far away from reality you can go before you accidentally double back and start stumbling into authenticity again.  If someone remakes this remake in fifteen years they’ll likely fuck around and end up telling a legitimately true story by mistake.