REVIEW: Paranormal Activity 4

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Written by: Zack Estrin and Christopher B. Landon. Starring: Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively, Katie Featherston and Brady Allen. Rated R (I can't imagine why this is R - there is almost no violence shown and not much more than a few bad words). Running time: 88 minutes.

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

REVIEW: Paranormal Activity 3

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011): Dir. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost. Written by: Christopher B. Landon. Starring: Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown, Christopher Nicholas Smith and Sprague Grayden. Rated R (Language and some bedroom foreplay). Running time: 84 minutes. 

2 stars (out of four)

Paranormal Activity 3 is a clumsy movie, an ungainly series of more or less detached scenes dutifully strung together into a something that only roughly resembles a narrative. The premise, warmed over from the last two installments, will be familiar to anyone who has seen one or both of those films: a spectral presence visits upper-middle-class suburbia and its phantom interactions with creaky doors and kitchenware are recorded with admirable thoroughness by a man with a camera fetish.

The footage of these paranormal shenanigans has been found and conveniently edited for us into a manageable 80-odd minutes though who found and edited the material is a mystery the film is not interested in solving. The opening scene reveals that the videotapes we are watching were stolen from the family in Paranormal Activity 2’s house so perhaps the phantom itself has gone through the trouble of editing the film! Or perhaps I’m asking too many questions.

The year is 1988 and the house haunted is that of Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown), younger versions of the hapless heroines from Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, respectively. You will recall that the events of those films were not Katie and Kristi’s first interactions with the ghostly creature. The demon had previously plagued their childhood and the details of that initial encounter are the focus of this film.

The man with the camera this time is Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), the boyfriend of the girls’ mother (Sprague Grayden). When young Kristi’s nighttime chats with an imaginary friend named Toby coincide with some unusual occurrences in the house, Dennis decides to set up a few tripods and use his totally neat VHS camcorder to get to the bottom of things.

What follows is a standard collection of “Boo!” moments, two of which are fake-outs so uninspired they actually consist of characters jumping in front of the camera and shouting “Boo!” These moments are effective, I suppose, but offer little that can’t be replicated by a visit to a haunted house. Clearly the filmmakers want to develop the mythology of the series (thus the prequel for this outing) but if this is the case there needs to be more intrigue and less cheap scares.

I don’t mean to say that an elaborate plot is necessary or even wanted for this sort of film. There is nothing inherently wrong with spooking audiences just for the fun of it. But there is a fine line between tension and tedium and too often PA3 confuses the two. For lengthy stretches of the film, nothing happens. Yes, this means you may be caught off guard when a scare comes but the effect is a little like lulling someone to sleep only to shake them violently when their eyelids shut. There is no craft or skill involved.

I will say that the last fifteen minutes are not awful. There is a decently choreographed and minimally annoying use of first-person shaky-cam (carefully edited to look like one long take) but the sequence stands alone. It is one scene of momentarily effective filmmaking, solid technique stranded without a narrative.

If you enjoyed the second film there is no overwhelming reason to skip this one. In a number of subtle ways, PA3 is more inventive than its predecessor but it is also less satisfying. The film is a mostly joyless execution of sudden movements and loud bangs, and ends abruptly without really going anywhere.

There is one other part of the film I want to mention, something that has become an odd trend in all the Paranormal Activity movies. There are scenes in this film when we watch Dennis watching the footage from the previous night. For what purpose would he film himself at such a moment? When would he ever need to go back and watch this? It doesn’t make much sense in the context of the film and isn’t any fun to watch. Part of me is tempted to interpret these scenes as some sort of odd, misplaced postmodern comment on a culture of pervasive recording and watching. Mostly though, I suspect it is simply misguided filmmaking.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/29/11

REVIEW: Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity (2009): Written and Directed by Oren Peli. Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs. Rated R (language). Running time: 86 minutes

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Apparently reality is the only thing that can truly scare us anymore. Over the past several years, there’s been a growing subgenre of horror films that create pseudo-realities out of handheld cameras and amateur actors. Starting ten years ago with The Blair Witch Project, and more the more recent Quarantine based on the Spanish REC, these films could be seen as a reaction to the disgusting unreality of the ever-popular torture porn movies. They are bringing the suspense and terror back to a genre that has recently been confusing squeamishness for real fright.

Paranormal Activity follows this trend of simulating home videos, even going so far as leaving out a title sequence and end credits. The home movie in questions accounts the haunting of college undergrad Katie, who claims to have been followed her whole life by an evil spirit, which we learn from a psychic to be a demon. Micah, Katie’s live-in boyfriend, hopes to catch the demon on camera while they sleep and even try to get it out of his house. For the purposes of this film, he captures every part of the process with a high-quality video and sound system.

The film’s mockumentary style is hardly innovative, but what makes Paranormal Activity so remarkable is the way it plays on our expectations for a horror film, and subverts them in every scene. Writer/director Oren Peli deconstructs the genre to its most basic elements, putting new twists on classic tricks and continually surprising us with simple but effective filmmaking.

The structure of the film systematically winds up the audience by building tension in its night scenes (when the demon comes out) and providing release in the daytime scenes. Peli conditions the audience with this pattern of tension, release, tension, release, until the demon starts creating mayhem in the daytime and there is no relief to be found by the light of day. The actual paranormal activity in the film gradually builds in intensity, beginning with a simple swing of the door and later escalating to more horrific occurrences.

Each of these scares, particularly those in the night-cam shots, is carefully created with simple tricks of lighting and editing, but they’re effective in their simplicity. After a tense anticipatory build-up, a mere shadow on the wall is enough to cause a jolt. Paranormal Activity, which was shot in a week in Peli’s house on a minimal budget, is a testament to my theory that the scariest films are those made on a low budget.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, who use their actual names in the film, give naturalistic performances that succeed in enhancing the film’s verisimilitude without growing tedious. Underneath their improvised dialogue and true-to-life reactions however, they play stock horror film characters: the comely, vulnerable girl and her cocky, self-assured boyfriend. That Peli hides these artifices under the guise of a home movie makes the film all the more impressive.

Along with Drag Me to Hell, this is the second horror film in a year to feature demons as its specter of choice and I’m wondering if they’re not currently the most ripe with frightful potential. Zombies and ghosts have had more than their fair share of the market (don’t even get me started on vampires) and seem to be capable of creating real mystery, something lacking in most of today’s horror fare. Paranormal Activity has so far received a limited release, but will be enjoying a wider release this weekend – just in time for Halloween. Now if a film like this could take even a small bite out of Saw VI’s box office, I would rest easier in my demon-plagued bed.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/13/09