Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shiveley, Aiden Lovekamp, Brady Allen and Katie Featherston
Folks...just because it's there doesn't mean you have to watch it. I posted an entire rant on this very subject several months back, and it's required reading for everyone in the entire world. For everyone who missed it, the gist of it is this: I continue to be amazed (literally, it boggles my brain) how many people continue to force themselves to watch every movie franchise or TV series that they no longer enjoy with the rationale being "well, I've watched everything up until this point, so I guess I have to watch the rest." Um...no, you don't. Unless there is some law on the books that says that once you see the first film or episode of something that a man hides out in your closet with a gun trained at your head unless you follow said thing to completion, you're perfectly free to, you know, skip out once it starts to suck. The Law of Diminshing Returns tends to hit like a motherfucker, and I present Paranormal Activity 4 as the proof.
Oh boy, this film. 'Memba how I said that I gave up on this series in theaters after the second one because it wasn't as good as the first? Well, the twenty bucks I spent on this box set is going to have to motivate me to keep going forward, because this one just wasn't good. The first, again, was a legitimately scary flick. The second had its fair share of shocks, and the third at least had that great sequence with the sheet and the rotating fan cam. In this one, there's a whole lot of nothing. It does have a few redeeming factors that I'll get to a few paragraphs from here, but overall it's just a very tepid and borderline BORING time. The market seemed to agree; while this movie still made a massive profit off of its $5 million budget, the gross was significantly lower than the first three films. There really is only so much you can do with this formula, but let's see how much more I can pull out of my ass in explaining it. THE MOVIE!
For those keeping score, Paranormal Activity 3 was a prequel film that gives us the back story and motivation behind everything that has happened so far. I threw a little spoiler alert in the last review before I mentioned exactly what it was, but hell, these movies are already old by this point, so what does it matter? Think lots of witches' covens, first-born son sacrifices and other assorted demonic debauchery. That one handled the back story, and this one is actually a sequel to the second movie, which ended with cursed Katie from the original film killing her sister and taking her infant son away. Five years later, and here we are.
The setup: This time around, your main character is a teenage girl. Named Alex, she's played by Kathryn Newton, and the character is unfortunate. See, this isn't just a teenage girl; it's a 2010s teenage girl brought to life on the screen, which means Converse sneakers, skinny jeans and constant phone browsing every time there is a dull moment. I don't know if a single paragraph has ever made me feel older typing it, but here we are. Can't close that Pandora's Box. She has a boyfriend named Ben (Matt Shiveley), and during the course of their Titanic-esque courtship Ben records their Skype sessions and begins seeing weird stuff happening in the house. There's your recording motif, as computers are what captures everything this time.
The meat: The rest of the family consists of a pretty nondescript mother and father, along with Alex's little brother Wyatt. The ghostly visitations come once a weird neighbor kid named Robbie starts hanging around the house, with the movie springing its first effective jump scare on us as Alex and Ben go up to the tree house in the middle of the night only to find Robbie there staring into a corner. Fairly normal behavior, if you ask me. Robbie just moved into the neighborhood, and his mother is soon revealed to be in the hospital for some unknown reason. I'll give you one guess as to who said mother figure is. At any rate, Robbie is now staying with the family for a few days, which means that the plot can jump start.
There are two long-running motifs in this series. I've brought one of them up, which is that every movie seems to have a "signature" camera shot. This time around, it's the family living room with the lights off, dots of light illuminating the surroundings. It's creepy and leads to a few good ghost reveals, but it's nowhere near as effective as that "oscillating fan camera" from the last one, or even the overhead kitchen shot from the second. The other motif is that whenever the movie wants to spring a surprise on us, we have this guttural, bass-filled "rumble" that fills the soundtrack. I remember sitting in the dark theater when I saw the first film and thinking that it really added to the atmosphere. By this point, the shine was off and I just found it annoying. Yet more A+ film criticism from this reporter.
What more is there to expound upon? Well, Katie eventually reappears from the "hospital," and I have to admit that it was good to see her in a fairly regular role again. Featherston is actually a pretty good actress, and I would certainly have liked to see her in more horror films because she has a very good, relatable quality when she's not possessed by demons. Spoiler alert. All throughout the film, the entity appears to have been targeting Wyatt, and I will also give it to the movie in this regard as it sprung a surprise on me when it comes to this kid that I genuinely did not see coming. But it's kind of a sprinkle in the shit sandwich.
The reason? This movie just isn't scary. At all. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I was able to call every jump, every time that a door would slowly creak open, every time a shadow would run past the camera, etc. I'd seen this three times before. The thrill was gone. Without spoiling everything that happens, I'll also say that I felt extremely let down by the ending. These days, it almost takes incredible balls for a horror movie to NOT have an open-ended final sequence, and given that this flick had the tagline "All the Activity Has Led to This," this would have been a good opportunity for the good guys to actually pull one out for a change. Nope. But...that probably would have led to no additional sequels, so we can't have nice things.
That's what we get with Paranormal Activity 4. It's competent and well-produced, but with pretty much every specific it just feels there. The acting is by and large bad, with the exception of Featherston in her brief scenes. The kid who plays Wyatt in particular is grating to the core. The camera gimmick feels even less believable in this one than it does in previous installments, especially in the finale. And the plot springs that one good surprise on us, but even that isn't enough to barely lull us out of submission. Suffice to say, I can't recommend this one.
* 1/2 out of ****. And I realize that there are two more of these things to cover before I'm done. But if anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for breaking my own Golden Rule of Entertainment, I say...screw it. I spent $20 on six movies and that's a pretty damn good ratio in my book.
No comments:
Post a Comment