No More Monsters for Scully

A cold and claustrophobic thriller, "X-Files: I Want To Believe," turned up in theaters last week with little notice, and even less advertising. Expect it to vanish under similarly strange circumstances.

It’s been six years since the television series went

off the air. This movie, a stand-alone successor, is unlikely to enthrall the show’s fans, who, I'm guessing, are already lining up for their third and fourth helpings of "The Dark Knight."

Directed by Chris Carter, the creator of "The X-Files," from a script

he co-wrote with Frank Spotnitz, "I Want To Believe" doesn’t waste

time on a back story. The movie picks up five years after the show’s conclusion. When we left them, FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) had quit the bureau, having survived a government conspiracy so vast and complex that it could only be

understood in Klingon.

Since then the two have taken up separate lives. Sort of.

Scully is a doctor. Mulder is still chasing little green men. But he does it from

a computer, in a cabin in the woods. Following the ambiguity of the show, there is some doubt as to whether the two are, you know, a couple. Have they ever? Will they ever? By now it hardly matters.

But the old partners are dragged out of their retirement, like aging generals, when an FBI agent disappears in West Virginia. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a defrocked Catholic priest (the Scottish actor Billy Connolly) who complains of visions and develops the disconcerting habit of bleeding from the eyes. Then a number of severed limbs turn up frozen, ice-cube like, in a lake, and in comes a team of Russian doctors and some very, very weird science.

The problem with "I

Want To Believe" is a general slackness of the script. "I Want To Believe" isn’t at all funny and weird. It was the genius (not too strong a word) and wit of the "X-Files" to seek out the monsters, not in the unknown, but in Middle America. Thus, the

family of vampires living in a Texas trailer park, the cannibal hiding

under the bed of Motel 6, and, my own favorite, The New Jersey Flukeman. Hands up if you remember this charming creature? Neither man nor worm, but a 6-foot in-between that swam ashore following the Chernobyl meltdown.

"I Want To Believe" doesn’t have anything nearly as funny. The villain, a guy with bad teeth who carries his victims off in a gunnysack, is merely trashy, as are the scares. Once capable of administering thrills with the precision of an intravenous drip, this "X-Files" finds itself in the grisly territory of the "Silence of the Lambs" and its gross sequels.

The "X-Files" hits it’s stride at the same moment the Internet did, and

the show seemed to run on the same paranoid conspiracy chatter then in

vogue. Of course, that was 10 years ago, and the TV show, while an undisputed classic, seems of an earlier time, and not without its

retrospective ironies. (One of the show’s plot lines involved FEMA, circa 1998, taking control of the American government.)

Once again, it’s Scully who gets it right.

"I’m done chasing monsters in the dark," she says.

So are we.

"X-Files: I Want To Believe" is rated PG-13 for violent and disturbing content. It is playing at the Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and the Cineroms in Winsted and Torrington in Connecticut. And elsewhere.