2 stars (out of four)
Fourth time around, the same old shit. A girl who thinks her
home is haunted, a guy who rigs the house with surveillance equipment to catch
the action on film, a creepy kid, creaking doors, bumps in the night and poor
decisions made to go investigate the noises.
The invisible demon from the first three movies is at it
again and he’s up to the usual pranks. He’ll breathe on you, throw you against
the ceiling, drag you halfway across the floor. Anything but show his face.
That would, of course, cost more money for the filmmakers and the Paranormal
Activity movies are a franchise built on
budgetary frugality.
The girl is fifteen-year-old Alex (Kathryn Newton). She and
her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) document their lives all day long on their
laptops and smartphones for reasons never explained. Are all teenagers these
days this vain? When my friends bust out a camera and start filming me, I tell
them to knock it off. The characters in this movie make little to no objection
over Alex and Ben’s incessant filming even when the camera gets right up in
their face. I realize the found footage shtick is necessary for later when the
spooky stuff starts but the gimmick is wearing pretty thin.
A young mother and her son move into Alex's neighborhood and
the boy, Robbie (Brady Allen), is real weirdo. Something happens one night and
the mother is hospitalized, leaving little Robbie all alone. Alex’s family
decides to take him in until his mother is better and, sure enough, creepy things
begin to happen while the kid is in their house.
You’ve seen it all before and you’ve seen it better. The
scares are the usual cheap tricks – loud noises, objects suddenly moving – and
at this point the franchise is well into self-parody territory. There is one bit with a missing knife that makes you think some much-needed blood and gore is going to be introduced into the series, but it's a tease and a letdown. The only good
scare comes in the last thirty seconds and the whole ending is really just a
rip-off of the final scene from the third film. Still, if you see the movie
with a packed house, you’ll probably have a good time.
There are a lot of shots in the film that allow us to take a
whole room in while we watch and wait for something to happen. It often feels
like a communal version of one of those “Spot the Difference” cartoons from the
Sunday paper and spread out on a big screen, it can actually be kind of fun.
“Yo, the clock just stopped,” shouts a kid from two rows behind me. He’s right,
it did. I wouldn’t have noticed that otherwise.
For what it’s worth, I believed the actors and their
dialogue feels like overheard conversation. I especially enjoyed Matt Shively
as the boyfriend. His character is a classic horror movie archetype – a
well-intentioned doof who believes in the boogeyman but mostly just wants to
get laid. When Alex reads online that demons are only interested in virgins, he
kindly offers to go upstairs and rectify this problem for her.
That bit about virgins does not jibe at all with what we’ve
learned about the demon in past movies but whatever, this is not a series
interested in developing its mythology or furthering the plot from film to
film. Katie (Katie Featherston), the poor girl who got possessed in the original, shows up for some series continuity but, regrettably, without the
generous amounts of cleavage on display in the first two movies.
The Paranormal Activity
films would have you believe that they’re all about the same thing, that
they’re building toward something, that they’re gradually revealing some secret
about the demon and its origins. The real secret of these movies though is that
nothing actually happens in them.
- Steve Avigliano, 10/21/12
