A new “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” “The Fourth Kind” is hoping to ride the coattails of a certain box-office phenom.

Presented as a true story, the new film takes its title from the famous description of alien encounters. You know the “third kind” is contact. The “fourth kind” is abduction. My guess is the “fifth kind” involves probes of some sort. They can’t be any more painful than sitting through this.

Mixing what is purported to be “real” footage circa 2000 and audio recordings with re-enactments and testimony, including interviews conducted by writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi with the film’s gaping, unblinking, unhinged heroine Dr. Abigail Tyler, “The Fourth Kind” begins with Milla Jovovich of “Resident Evil” fame as herself standing in front of a whirling camera. She tells us that we can “choose” to believe what we like (meaning, I presume, that this is hooey). Jovovich also plays Abbey in the film’s re-enactments, none too plausibly.

What comes next is incoherent, incompetent and insufferably shaky-cammed. Abbey’s psychologist husband Will, we learn, was tracking some strange phenomenon involving residents of Nome, Alaska (I know) and a white owl when he was killed by an intruder with a knife, something we see in a fuzzy re-enactment.

The widowed Abbey, also a psychologist, lives with her rebellious tween son and younger daughter Ashley (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and continues to see patients, including Scott (Enzo Cilenti) and Tommy (Corey Johnson), whom she hypnotizes to recover lost memories of terrible, terrifying events.

Also among the cast of characters are Nome Sheriff August (Will Patton, tossing furniture), Abbey’s colleague Abel (Elias Koteas) and Sumerian-language scholar Dr. Awolowa Odusami (Hakeem Kae-Kazim). The acting is by and large appalling.

Osunsanmi no doubt sees himself as another M. Night Shyamalan. But compared to him, the fantasist of Philadelphia is the Orson Welles of paranormal activities. Speaking of which I assume the suits at Universal think they have another “Paranormal Activity” with probing aliens instead of a house demons. Sorry, guys. Your movie is a real ’owl.

Rated PG-13. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters.

(In addition to being mind-numbingly awful, “The Fourth Kind” contains violent/disturbing images and brief sexuality.)