When Hollywood advertises that a film is "based on true events," as they have for The Mothman Prophecies, I almost immediately toss it back. It’s rare to find a big-budget film that even closely resembles the real story that they’re purporting to tell. What changed my mind here, though, is that The Mothman Prophecies is directed by Mark Pellington. Pellington made Arlington Road, a superior, little-known thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins. That film had a compelling story and, more importantly, an ending that took me quite by surprise -- as rare in a Hollywood film as adherence to facts. That made this one look more promising.

Richard Gere stars as John Klein, a Washington Post reporter who inexplicably drives hundreds of miles in a single hour and ends up in a sleepy place called Point Pleasant. He’s rattled about how he got to Point Pleasant so fast, but his troubles are quickly overshadowed by the strange things he witnesses when he’s there. And when someone warns him that the freak occurrence that brought him to this place perhaps wasn’t so freaky after all, he begins to realize that there may well be a purpose to what happened, and to what’s happening around him. The people of Point Pleasant are having strange hallucinations that usually involve the appearance of a large moth-like creature. While some of the people can be simply labeled as crazy, others have physical wounds to prove it. His instincts as a reporter take over and he tries to unravel the mystery that’s consuming this small place.

The Mothman Prophecies is likely best labeled as a supernatural thriller with sprinkles of horror thrown in. In ways, it succeeds. Pellington’s a good director and he keeps the action tight and the story moving along at a brisk pace. There are moments when Prophecies is genuinely creepy. Plus, the cinematography is stylish and the editing is innovative. That makes for an interesting, visual experience. And the story, although full of holes, is interesting enough to keep you wondering. Still, Prophecies veers off course too many times, most often, it seems, from not trusting the core of its own story. Every so often little things are tossed in that have nothing to do with the story and serve only to jar a weaned-on-TV audience that equates horror and suspense with stupid and cheap thrills. I suspect that this film could have been much better, but it’s been dumbed down to play to the masses. Arlington Road stayed true to its story, The Mothman Prophecies does not.

As I mentioned, the visuals are quite captivating and that’s been transferred fairly well to DVD. There are some glitchy moments when the image is not up to the quality that it could be, but overall, it’s very good. Sound too is well done and there are plenty of sequences that are made quite a bit more suspenseful by eerie sound effects and effective use of surround channels. DVD extras, though, are sorely lacking, consisting of mainly a music video (for one of the songs in the film) that Pellington directed.