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Screenwriter Zak Penn has made a fortune writing screenplays for appliance-sized blockbusters like X2, but early in this problematic documentary, he says he wants to make a movie that will give him credibility. It might be the only true statement in the film. Ostensibly the account of Werner Herzog’s investigation into the crypto-zoological mystery of the title, Penn’s directorial debut meanders among genres, from a documentary about a traumatic film production like Burden of Dreams to a fraudumentary like The Blair Witch Project to a mockumentary like Waiting for Guffman. The tension among these competing approaches might provide the film’s greatest pleasure next to the great Herzog himself extolling "ecstatic truth" as embodied in one’s belief in Nessie and dismissing such side issues as globalization and the monster’s actual existence as "television." You’ll smell a rat long before Herzog does; by the end, Incident is neither truth nor television but something in between. (94 minutes)