"All the activity has led to this"? Well that's just unfortunate really.
Following the events of Paranormal Activity 2 and after Katie and young Hunter disappeared, we follow another family, their daughter Alex, her boyfriend and her younger brother Wyatt. You guessed it, paranormal activity starts happening around their house, around the same time a mysterious young boy and his mother move in across the street.
My biggest problem with this film, asides the total lack of scares, is that its the exact same plotting as the third film. We have the same set up; there's nothing wrong until a ceiling light wobbles, there's constant pranks by the characters, demons being obsessed with children's toys, replace two young girls with two young boys, and generally nothing happening for the first hour.
Yes, the fourth film takes an hour (fifty-three minutes exactly) before anything actually "paranormal" happens. Of a ninety-six minute run time.
Now we are set in "modern day", this house is festooned with laptops. It is established early on that these laptops record everything their web cameras film and they film all the time (no sleep mode for these computers) so they hide them about the house to film the activity. Funny how they never view the footage, like when Alex is levitated off the bed.
Personal gripe about horror films nowadays. Consider: when you are in pitch darkness and are carrying a laptop with you (just go with it) do you run through the dark with the screen illuminating your beautiful face? No. No one would do that! You would turn the screen around to light your surroundings, you see less with a big bright light in your face! It is the equivalent of pointing the flashlight into your face.
You will see that this film made me ask all the wrong questions under the conditions of a badly made movie. There are, for the first time in the series, inconsistencies with the recorded footage. A time stamp in the corner of the screen normally represents a recording, but PA4 decides to sometimes remove the stamp... for no reason. This and sudden jump cuts, not even blurring, static cuts, just an edit that saves a character the time of walking across a room.
The plot goes absolutely nowhere since Paranormal Activity 3 since it spends so much time retreading the same "scare" beats and setup. This series is now worse than the Saw films.
There's so little to actually say about this film, those it does make the third part appear good.
Additional Marshmallows: I didn't even talk about the Xbox Kinnect gimmick, which is conveniently the meeting spot for the ghosts.
The best scares were the movie's characters pulling pranks on one another.
With Paranormal Activity 2 following the events of the first film, it is only logical in the studio's mind to crank out a prequel for the third part. We see Katie from the first film as a child, and witness the start of her demonic experiences through the eyes of a skeptical mother and a camera wielding step-father.
Maybe I will reconsider it if I watch it again, but Paranormal Activity was excellent in my opinion, I even wrote a post about how I felt its fixed camera gimmick was clever in forcing the viewer to keep watching. Other critics disagreed, and what we have now is exactly what those critics said: protracted silent moments of waiting for household objects to move.
It took a miserable five minutes before I was demanding this guy put his camera down just once (what a gent: filming two women carry boxes into the basement instead of helping out) I was honestly surprised when he didn't rescue the camera during an "earthquake". Even during family trauma (potentially aggravated by having cameras everywhere) his response to being asked to put the camera down: "No, it's okay, I feel like I need to be useful".
There are no scares here. Everything is so framed and set up scene-by-scene that only a total idiot wouldn't see the supposed jumps coming, even the slower atmospheric moments are by the numbers: oh, block our vision will you? I guess someone will be behind him when we can see again? Yup, hi there. Oh, block our vision again? That shadowy someone is gone again? Yup.
Possibly one of the best sequences involves the Bloody Mary chant at a mirror. Wow, I know this is set in 1988 but that scare is really, really old.
By all appearances this film is trying to mimic the first (random sleep-walking time lapse footage) and it tries to pull off the same shock ending, but has to magic away four characters to do the whole "alone in a house" routine.
Generally speaking film franchises are supposed to get more extreme as they go (the Saw movies got increasingly gorier, for example) but here it feels like less happens, at least in terms of scares and in terms of explaining anything. "Discover how the activity began" boasts the tagline. Really? I certainly saw things occur, but I have no idea how any of it began.
The first film had me on the edge of my seat for the last twenty minutes, the second one wasn't as successful but felt like a decent sequel, this one just feels wasted; boring cliches replacing potential story building. But then that would be suggesting these writers could write a story.
