Forgotten X-Files movie is finally being released after agonising 18-year wait

Right now in dark, smoke-filled offices, in places you’re not allowed to know the names of, men in grey suits are making decisions about your future.

The future of your entertainment, that is!

Yes, the suits in Hollywood have taken a break from preparing us for an imminent alien invasion to release a film we’ve been waiting 18 years to see.

The director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe (or to give it its new title, The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn) is finally being released on Disney Plus on August 14.

Originally released in theatres in 2008, this dark film is set several years after Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) have retired from the FBI.

When an FBI agent goes missing, however, and a disgraced paedophile priest (Billy Connolly) starts having psychic visions, Mulder and Scully are brought back into the fold to get to the bottom of this disturbing case.

Upon its original release, I Want To Believe was critically panned, earning a rather paltry 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis found the film “‘baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark’ while Jan Stuart from the Los Angeles Times said it ‘was a load of malarkey’.

And yet even then critics could sense the film had something about it they liked, with Stuart adding it was ‘thoughtful malarkey and compulsively watchable’.

Meanwhile, king of the film critics Roger Ebert compared the film to The Dark Knight in the way it questioned the lines between good and evil.

A common complaint among fans, however, about the film was that it simply wasn’t weird or scary enough, especially compared to normal episodes of The X-Files.

Indeed, director (and X-Files creator) Chris Carter claimed that Century Fox asked him to tone down the horror in his initial cut to secure a PG-13 rating.

But Vrach Frankenshteyn will restore these scenes and amp up the scares.

‘I made it too scary, and I was told so by the brass at Fox, and they wanted a PG-13 movie,’ Carter told Duchovny last year.

‘Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended … It’s not just doing a director’s cut to do a director’s cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.’

Fans are already excited by the trailer with ad_cfc11 writing on Reddit: ‘This trailer makes it look like one of the creepiest thrillers I’ve ever seen.’

Can it live up to the hype? Well, I want to believe…

Disney Plus will declassify The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn on August 14.