Richard Gere (above) gives an unconvincing performance as a Washington Post journalist beset by strange happenings after the sudden death of his wife in the mediocre "The Mothman Prophecies." [Click to enlarge]

Robert Wise initiated it with "The Haunting," Chris Carter revived it with TV's "The X-Files" and M. Night Shyamalan made it cuddly with "The Sixth Sense."

The template has been set: average people confronted with an unseen, otherworldly evil struggle with their belief system by exchanging awed whispers, gaping conversational pauses and ethereal stares in shadowy hallways, punctuated by action set-pieces and frequent, ear-splitting soundtrack spikes.

"The Mothman Prophecies" would like to sit up on the shelf with "The Sixth Sense," but Pellington's film is more reminiscent of the turgid, humorless style of the late Alan J. Pakula. Pellington even makes his protagonist, played by Richard Gere, a Washington Post reporter, in a possible nod to Pakula's "All the President's Men."

Pellington is a former music video director (he shot Pearl Jam's blood-soaked "Jeremy" video) who previously directed the gaseous conspiracy thriller "Arlington Road" (incidentally, Pakula also specialized in gaseous conspiracy thrillers).

It isn't that Pellington is a bad director – he has a genuine visual talent for creating a mood of existential gloom – but like most MTV-to-Hollywood transplants he furiously over-directs, careening and spinning his camera mindlessly while barely navigating his way through a simple exchange of dialogue.

"The Mothman Prophecies" is based on a series of events that occurred in the mid-1960s in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where sightings of a dark, winged creature were thought to presage a horrible tragedy that eventually claimed 47 lives.

In this heavily fictionalized version, Gere plays an investigative reporter who, still grieving over the death of his beloved fiancée, inexplicably appears in Point Pleasant, and immediately finds himself thrust into the "mothman" mystery.

Many of the humble citizens of Point Pleasant have been experiencing bizarre hallucinations involving a shadowy creature whose only tangible form is the Y-shaped, charcoal-colored scribble made by every person who sees him.

When Gere recognizes that form as the same one drawn by his fiancée before she died he decides to investigate further, eventually coming to believe that the "mothman" is a premonition of imminent disaster.

Laura Linney co-stars as the sensible town sheriff, but she exists only for Gere to stare at moistly, then coyly look away from. Check out Linney's smart, sharp performance in "You Can Count On Me" to see just how demeaning this role really is.

The rest of the cast holds your attention – Will Patton and Alan Bates do decent character work as, respectively, a spooked citizen and a hermetic "mothman" expert – and there is a fantastic climactic disaster scene that compensates for much of the film's fatalistic hokum.

And what about Gere? He's just as squishy as ever, a serviceably solemn figurehead to a minor movie. As a journalism major, I'd also like to add that Gere couldn't be less convincing a newspaper reporter if he were an apricot.

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