The Purge: Anarchy

Author's Note: Well...this is it. This is officially the end of my review list. No, I'm not done. This blog will continue. However, I will be scaling down to Fridays only, with Wednesday Review as horror movies come out. It's a bittersweet moment, knowing that I've worked so hard for so long to complete this. I hope you all enjoy this, my 153^rd regular review.

The Purge was a firecracker aimed at American's political Right. The Purge:Anarchy is a grenade. It's one of the most drastic perspective shifts in the history of Cinema. We're no longer seeing the Purge through the eyes of a rich, white family whose lives are in danger purely through their own bad luck. Instead, we see the people who fear for their lives every year.

There are five characters in three converging storylines. The most prominent characters are Eva and Cali Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo and Zoė Soul), a mother and daughter who are nearly raped by their apartment's maintenance man moments after the Purge commences, only for him to be killed by armored members of a Government Death Squad sent out to subsidize the killing.

Shortly before commencement they found a note revealing that Eva's father (John Beasley) sold himself to a wealthy family to be killed. This is a moment that somehow manages to be both touching and a punch to the gut, which shows us how truly sick the people of this society are, but the matter doesn't really come up again. I actually consider this something of a bold move on the part of the filmmakers, on a night as horrible as the Purge bad things happen and we have to move on.

Meanwhile, husband and wife Shane and Liz (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez), are stuck in the midst of the Purge when a group of masked bikers cut their fuel line before commencement. All four characters are rescued by a mysterious man (Frank Grillo), who has come out to willingly participate in the Purge in search of one target. I use the term “rescued” loosely, here. While the man does save Eva and Cali, Shane and Liz sneak into his car, and he initially wants to cut all four of them loose afterward. However, over the course of the night they find means of staying near him, and it becomes clear that he isn't going to let an innocent person die while standing in front of him.

I'm not sure if the stranger's name is officially Leo Barnes, or if that's fan-given. If it was given in the movie I missed it, but IMDB credits the character as simply “Sergeant” for both Anarchy and the (as of this writing) upcoming Election Year. That said, most news sources seem to have no problem calling him Leo Barnes, so for the sake of simplicity I'll call him that for the rest of the review.

Of these three stories, I'd say Shane and Liz are easily the least developed. Basically, they're in the film because they were dumb enough to be out shortly before the Purge began. The only real development we get from them is Shane's death, leading to Liz's decision to Purge herself by fighting the people who killed him.

The story actually gets amazingly complex given the premise, with our heroes caught in the crossfire between at least three factions who are at varying degrees of war with each other on Purge night. We find out that the bikers are not themselves Purgers, but work for wealthy Purgers by kidnapping people off the streets and bringing them to be auctioned off for a Most Dangerous Game-style hunt. The government Hit Squad is led by a man named Big Daddy (Jack Conley), who not only sees The Purge as patriotic, but sees any attempt to save lives on Purge Night as morally wrong, and thus becomes determined to kill Barnes.

The final faction, however, is an anti-Purge Resistance Movement, led by a man named Carmelo Johns (Michael K. Williams), a character who's half-street preacher, half-Black Panther. Johns is established early in the film when Cali watches his videos online, but most of the population appears to believe he's simply an ideologue standing on a soap box, and are shocked when he and his followers actually succeed in taking out one of the Death Squads, and break into the auction house just in time to save four of our five heroes (the aforementioned loss of Shane), and recruiting Liz to their cause.

We eventually find out that Barnes is headed for the home of a drunk driver who killed his son. The ending is predictable: he threatens the man, the camera cuts away, and Barnes walks out of the house. He's shot and wounded by Big Daddy, who monologues about the importance of killing during the Purge rather than finishing him off. Big Daddy is then shot down by the driver, who Barnes had spared. The Purge ends, the Death Squad backs off, and Eva and Cali rush Barnes to a now-open hospital.

The first thing I should note is that the decision to carry Barnes over to the next film is easy to understand. He's badass, while still managing to be sympathetic. He's clearly someone who could easily make it among the upper echelons of Purgers if he participated without discretion, but instead he remains on a moral razor-edge. The decision of such a powerful individual to reject violence is a resounding statement within this universe. Honestly, forget Crossbones, this is the role Grillo was born to play.

I don't make a secret of the fact that I'm a Liberal (or Progressive or whatever else you want to call it), so it's obvious this series would appeal to me. Where the first movie seemed mildly insightful, this movie at times approached brilliance with it's social satire. The first film gave us the perspective of the 1%, and showed us how it could all come crashing down. This movie, however, shows us the real dark side, revealing how people of lower means can come to support policies against their own interests if they believe that they can find a way to rise above the masses.

The bikers, for instance, are prepared to see their neighborhoods turned into war zones, and have their own lives put in extreme danger, for a wad of bills likely worth no more than a few hundred dollars. The people they capture are then resold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't think Bernie Sanders himself could have written a more clever send-up of Corporate greed.

Many of the characters who take part seem to represent a fairly uneducated version of Conservatives. I was fascinated to realize that in the first film there is never any reference to the “Right” to Purge being “given.” I imagine that in this world there's some justification for Purging being a “Natural Right” among educated Conservatives. In this film, however, at least two Purgers reference the Government “giving” them the Right. Notably, the maintenance man even gets the name of his own political party wrong, calling them the “New Found Fathers.”

I personally took the Death Squads as a parody of hypocritical corporate subsidies supported by “Free Market” advocates. The government allowed the Purge because it was “natural,” but then sends out killers when it turns out people aren't as naturally violent as they had hoped. Maybe I'm reading in too deeply, but I think the critique is there.

There are elements in this film that are underused. Carmelo Johns is little more than a cameo, clearly setting up for future films. Edwin Hodge returns as the homeless man from the first film, now one of Johns followers. Both Hodge and Williams give great performances, and I'm hoping Election Year features them fighting alongside Barnes much more extensively.

The bottom line is, if you're a liberal you'll like this movie. If you're a Libertarian or something similar, you'll probably also find some things to like. If you like the current Government Establishment...well, hello Senator McConnell, happy to have you reading my post! Unfortunately, you probably won't like this movie.

The Purge

When I started this blog I ended my initial list to be reviewed with the Saw, Paranormal Activity, and Purge series. I did this because I feel that these films have defined the last decade of horror. Each series spent several years as the single largest ongoing horror series, and just as one began to decline, the next came charging in to take the title.

This series is a bit different from the other two. So far, none of The Purge films have been given October releases (as I write this in February 2016, Election Year is scheduled for July). Furthermore, the Producers seem far less determined to get a yearly release out of The Purge series, judging by the two year delay between the second and third entries.

Unlike the other two series, it also gets better with age instead of worse. It's neither as boring as Paranormal Activity, nor as disgusting as Saw. More significantly, it's actually smarter than either. Where those films have begun their decent into obscurity, I actually think these movies will have a place in popular culture long after the final entry.

The biggest problem with this series is the narrative attempting to place the film in our future. The story would have worked far better in an alternate time line that diverged at least a hundred years ago. I can believe that humans raised in a society with so little value for human life could approve of something like the Purge, but I do not believe that an economic collapse could bring about acceptance of the idea so quickly from our current civilization. More importantly, plenty of people have analyzed how little sense the Purge makes economically. A purely cultural explanation would have been far more believable, something like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.

That said, I give this film my optimistic appraisal because it hits all the right buttons as a satire, while never winking at us or letting the material fall into spoof territory. The whole film is actually quite chilling. If you believe there are evil people in this world, you'll likely be afraid of this film whether it's realistic or not.

To address the actual movie, the premise is that the economic collapse of 2008 continued to get worse, until crime and poverty ran rampant. This allowed a new political party, The New Founding Fathers, to seize power and amend the US Constitution to legalize all crime for 12 hours (except for crimes committed against high-ranking government officials, or with military-grade weaponry). The catharsis of the Purge has apparently lowered the crime rate the rest of the year, and killing off the poor has taken a strain off the economy allowing for prosperity (yes, this is absurd).

The focus of this film is a single family during the Purge. Many fans of the series see this first film as inferior for precisely this reason: We're in the middle of utter chaos, and we get a home invasion thriller about this one household. However, I think it allows the film to make better use of it's rather modest budget (remember that the budget was tripled for Anarchy). It's also an effective introduction to this world, as we see how every member of the family deals with the idea of the Purge.

Mr. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) is a Security System salesman who has gotten rich from the fear, but can't bring himself to participate. He listens to the news with a conflicted look on his face, safe behind his barricades. His wife, Mary (Lena Heady), goes to exercise as the Purge starts, trying to keep her mind off it. Their daughter, Zoey (Adelaide Kane), barely acknowledges the Purge, and is far more concerned about her older boyfriend Henry (Tony Oller) who her father disapproves of. Their son, Charlie (Max Burkholder), is a card-carrying liberal who enjoys the benefits of his family's wealth while still voicing mild objections to the Purge.

The night probably would have gone well for the Sandins, but Charlie sees a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) running for his life down their street and opens the security system to let him in. The stranger disappears into their house to hide (while James is distracted by a gun battle with Henry, who snuck into the house and seems to exist in the movie only to be killed while providing this distraction). The Sandins' neighbors then inform a group of masked college students who had been chasing the man that the Sandins are hiding him. The students, led by an unnamed young man played by Rhys Wakefield, give the Sandins a time limit to surrender the man before they break down the security system and murder everyone in the house.

The drama of this scenario comes from two points: firstly, while the man is not hostile to the Sandins, we're shown that he has military dog tags, and clearly knows how to defend himself (we're told that he already killed one of the students). Secondly, the family has always accepted the Purge, but has never engaged in it themselves. With the exception of Charlie who continues trying to protect the man, the idea of actually giving another human being up to death clearly cuts them deep.

It's because of this uncertainty that they finally refuse the students. Instead of surrendering another human being, James decides to use his stockpile of weapons to turn into Rambo protecting his family (I like to imagine “I'm Rambo” literally being written into Hawke's contract to lower his salary by a hundred grand or so). We get a number of decent action scenes featuring him.

For some bizarre reason the family decides to just leave the homeless man to his own devices, rather than asking the veteran to help them defend their home. Perhaps they didn't want to put a gun in the hand of a stranger on Purge night, but I fail to see what they had to lose. That said, the action scene in this movie are really good for a $3 million film.

After James is killed all seems lost until the neighbors charge in and slaughter the students...because they want to kill the Sandins themselves. Apparently all their friends had grown bitter at James' success. I think the commentary for that scene is unspoken, but obvious. We hear the word “jealous” from rich Conservatives so much in our society, describing how they imagine the poor to view them. This scene cuts right to the truth: only the rich have the luxury of jealousy. The poor have real problems.

The stranger, however, saves the remaining Sandins, and Mary forces the surviving neighbors to sit peacefully in their house until the Purge is over. We get more propaganda over the news, and the film ends. What happens to the Sandins next is left to our imaginations.

Is this film as good as Anarchy? Hell no. Still, it's a prologue. It sets us up for what's to come, while providing a biting satire of the world we live in. A world where “patriotic” now means carrying an assault rifle on your back when you go to get lunch, and the Right constantly whine that they have to pay a higher tax rates than their housekeepers. The Purge will be remembered long after Saw, and Paranormal Activity have been forgotten.

Christmas Review: The Nightmare Before Christmas

I find this review a bit difficult to approach. Christmas and Halloween Reviews, of course, exist to recommend films and heap praise upon them. That said, I have yet to do a review of this movie in any form, and I find myself wanting to address the weaknesses of the movie. It’s not that the movie is in any sense “bad,” simply that director Henry Selick has so wildly outdone himself with Coraline and ParaNorman, while stop-motion technology has advanced rapidly, that Nightmare seems a bit quaint by comparison, and the animation seems odd and choppy in a way the later movies managed to avoid.

That said, however, this is still a movie that needs to be seen by anyone who hasn’t already done so. It’s dating is strictly on the technical end, as the characters are creative, and the musical numbers are absolutely amazing. The story is as simple as it needs to be, telling us a fairy tale, as we watch some truly memorable characters. There’s a reason why this movie pushes so much merchandise every year.

If anyone doesn’t know, The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the story of Jack Skellington, the skeleton king of Halloweentown (and by extension the holiday itself) who grows bored, and on a walkabout discovers Christmastown, and with it a new holiday. Jack, embodying the recklessness of his own holiday, decides he wants to take Santa’s job for a year, and rallies the creatures of Halloween to make him gifts and a sleigh, and to kidnap the real Santa for an unwelcome vacation.

Jack is unusual as a protagonist. Aside from raw enthusiasm, he has very few traditionally likable traits. He’s impulsive, selfish and utterly oblivious to the suffering of others. Furthermore, nothing in the story ever changes him for the better. He’s the embodiment of our darkest, most selfish urges. He’s not malicious, but that arguably just makes him our worst traits dressed up and playing hero.

Jack gets a love interest in the form of Sally, the voice of reason, who’s presence in Halloweentown seems downright bizarre. Surrounded by people who are completely insane, somehow this one Frankenstein-like creation of a mad scientist can see reason when all others fail to do so. Sally is every bit as much of a protagonist as Jack, and far more of a hero. I’m actually somewhat curious how their budding romance plays out, as I seriously question how long she would tolerate Jack’s childishness.

The movie also squeezes in a villain in the form of Oogie Boogie, a mysterious creature whose origins are never fully explained in the movie, and a climax. These, however, are clearly afterthoughts resolved in the last few minutes of the film. Apparently it was decided at some point that a childrens' film required at least one fight, and so we’re given that.

The movie is, for the most part, a visual and auditory experience more than a story. Every frame is a work of art, and the movie probably has more iconic images than almost any other film ever made since the invention of the camera. If you haven’t seen it, see it, along with Selick’s entire filmography since.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

When I started this blog I had an initial list of 153 posts planned out. The first 151 went off without a hitch, posting every week on Monday and Friday. However, this film represents the single addition to those 153 posts (disregarding my Wednesday Reviews), because it came out after I'd already started the blog. It also represents the first regular review I've posted that was previously a Wednesday Review although as of this writing I've already written two others for future use.

Looking back at that earlier review, I'm not proud of it. It seems rushed, and at times almost incoherent. I generally understand what I was trying to say, but I'm not entirely sure I said it. Perhaps this time around I'll be able to better express myself.

How slowly do these films move forward? The sixth entry starts by showing us the ending of the third. Apparently there was no need to remind us of anything in the last two entries, because they were both so utterly inconsequential.

With this film all pretense of realism is completely out the window. Our protagonist, Ryan (Chris J. Murray), finds a camera in his new house with a completely unique design. The camera seems to glitch periodically, but it eventually becomes clear that the glitches are actually Toby, who is haunting Ryan's daughter Leila (Ivy George).

Ryan also uncovers a series of tapes featuring the witch-training of Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) and Katie (Chloe Csengery). The children are able to describe the activities of Ryan and his family in the future, and what Leila's bedroom looks like. They're being trained by a man credited as Kent (Don McManus), whose presence in this film is a holdover from an alternate ending. There's no reason their training couldn't have been done by Lois (Hallie Foote).

Concerned about the safety of his family, and realizing that the owners of the house that previously stood on their new property captured a great deal of supernatural footage, Ryan decides to try his luck. He recruits his brother Mike (Dan Gill), who moved in with the family following a break-up, and gets grudging acceptance from his wife Emily (Brit Shaw). And so, he sets up cameras around the house...duh...

I have to admit that this film makes at least some effort to address my biggest concern with the previous films: clueless protagonists. While most of the footage Ryan finds in the house is original to this movie, it at least gives him the basic idea of a cult, a demon, and children being used as tools of evil relatively early in the film. We don't feel like we're waiting for him to catch up with us.

The film uses the fact that Ryan only has one camera that can see Toby to it's advantage. He sets up cameras in multiple positions all over the house, so we can cut between them, but only one can show us exactly what Toby's doing, so we often know where he is, but only find out why when he takes action.

Toby's appearance isn't especially scary, but it makes sense for what's been established. He's a floating, amorphous blob that often assumes a roughly human shape. I don't believe there's any indication that he's insubstantial, but he's malleable enough and mobile enough to simply move around people with ease until he wants to interact with them.

Eventually it becomes clear that Leila is Toby's target, as she begins to interact with him, and refuses to leave her room. She draws strange pictures, and begins using Toby's name. At one point she disappears temporarily through a portal in her bedroom, only to reappear again.

Eventually, a priest (Michael Krawic) is called in to help them. Father Todd is probably one of the most active characters I've ever seen in this series. He explains that Toby is haunting Leila, not the house, and that a simple exorcism is not enough. Instead, what the priest calls a Ritual of Extermination is necessary to destroy Toby once and for all.

The Extermination scene is intense, and we get to hear a scream from Toby when's he's briefly trapped in a magical circle, and draped in a holy-water soaked bedsheets. It's unbelievably satisfying after six movies. Finally, he's not invincible, and actual drama has entered the story. Unfortunately, the ritual does eventually fail, and the usual bloodbath ensues from an enraged Toby. With the aid of the camera we're treated to a CGI-fest that's at minimum entertaining. Killing the lights and presenting the whole scene to us in night vision helps. The CGI of this scene is far more elaborate than the rest of the film, and I imagine it would have looked incredibly cheap in color.

The film gives us the semblance of an ending, but it leaves just as many questions open. Apparently Toby was one of the “Seven Princes of Hell,” and the entire series was an attempt to use Leila and Hunter's (Aiden Lovecamp) blood to give him a physical body. Emily, the only survivor of the ritual, follows Leila through the portal into the 1980s...where the ritual successfully gives Toby a body before the series even starts,and he kills Emily.

I have no idea how this was supposed to be an ending. If this was the Cult's endgame then it was a pretty lame one. What does Toby plan to do with his newly acquired legs? I don't have a clue.

That said, I think a lot of the negative reviews that paint this film as the worst of the series are a bit overblown. It's not good, but it's fun. It's at least more exciting than a number of the previous entries in this series.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

This film is generally seen as the point at which the franchise hit rock bottom. I actually disagree with this assessment. In fact, I consider these two final films to be a major uptick in enjoyability. Ironically, the salvation of this film was the embracing of old-school horror cliches. The cast is now made up of a group of teenagers who are doomed not because of a curse, but because they are idiots. This gives the film a sense of direction and energy that's lacking in the other Paranormal Activities, where you just wait for Toby to finish the protagonists off.

This is one of those movies that has a real sense of multiple scripts being melded together. However, unlike most such cases, I'm unsure which was the “original” idea. On the one hand, there seems to be an implication that the protagonists were targeted by demons because they investigated the activities of the Cult. However, later in the film we're given some information that suggests one of the main characters was always a target of the Cult. My best guess for a reconciliation is that he'd fallen off their radar, and had the bad luck of putting himself back on it.

That's not a huge weakness, though. There's enough stupid teenaged antics in this film to keep me moderately amused for the run time, so I can put up with a bit of plot incoherence. Furthermore, I don't think the acting is especially bad.

I'd say the opportunity to mostly cast-off the other films for this entry was a huge benefit. For anyone unaware, The Ghost Dimension is considered the official fifth entry, with Marked Ones regarded as a spin-off. The entire reason this movie exists, unofficially, is demographics. The numbers said the franchise was popular among Hispanics, so a film with a mostly Hispanic cast was commissioned.

The movie starts with two recent High School graduates named Jesse and Hector (Andrew Jacobs and Jorge Diaz), who begin filming everything in their lives out of apparent boredom. When a neighbor (Gloria Sandoval) starts making strange noises, they attempt to peer through her vents, and see her and an attractive younger woman, taking part in a nude occult ritual. When the neighbor is murdered, the two friends investigate her apartment, because why not. They find an altar, VHS tapes, and a book of spells. Also, a boy named Oscar (Carlos Pratts) runs out of the apartment, apparently returning to the scene of a murder we later find out he committed.

So, the two would-be investigators perform an occult ritual with their friend Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh). What this has to do with finding the murderer I have no idea. Afterward, Jesse begins to develop psychic powers, and this is where the movie really starts to pick up. We pretty much know that Jesse is possessed, and that things will eventually go downhill, but for a while our protagonists have their fun. In fact, some scenes actually seem like the kind of thing you'd expect would-be magicians posing as psychics to post on YouTube (a point acknowledged when they read their comments). They get a game of Simon to answer Yes or No questions, and Jesse can momentarily levitate.

However, as is usually the case with supernatural powers in horror movies, Jesse begins to grow more violent and cruel with his powers. At first he just uses them to fight off a pair of muggers. By the end, he's torturing a dog with levitation just because he can.

We eventually find out that Oscar was possessed like Jesse, and was living under the apartment complex, where there's another altar covered in pictures of various people. We see Jesse's mother in a picture with a much younger version of their murdered neighbor, indicating that she was a member of the Cult. Also, Ali (Molly Ephraim) from the second film reappears, to explain to Hector and Marisol that the Cult marks unborn children for later possession. She tells them that if the Cult can perform a final ritual, Jesse's original personality will be completely erased. That officially makes this film the only case in the history of this franchise where the protagonists actually knew what the villains were up to before the final moments. In fact, this movie probably gives us more knowledge of the Cult than any of the “Official” five.

As is to be expected, Jesse's Catholic mother (Renee Victor) attempts to exorcize her son. The wise, devout Hispanic woman was a cliché already done in the second film, but here it bothers me a bit less because the entire cast is Hispanic, so there are less unfortunate implications. Of course the ritual fails, Jesse blows up the living room and then attempts to kill his mother the next day, before fleeing to join the cult.

The ending is unquestionably stupid, but amusingly so to me. The site of the ritual turns out to be Lois' house from the previous films. Not only is Jesse permanently possessed, but he chases Hector through a time portal to 2006, where he encounters Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) on the night of her possession. As it turns out, the noises in the kitchen at the end of the original film were Hector! That certainly needed an explanation!

Yes, the movie is dumb. However, I still find myself recommending it. There was no need for the final link to the first film, especially when Ali was already there to provide continuity, and the time travel angle is the final deathblow to subtlety in this series. Of course, it will continue into the next movie. However, it's fun, and the actors sell the material in a cheesy way. Plus, the connections are tenuous enough to make the movie stand on it's own. Honestly, I'd like to see some more spin-off films in this style.

Paranormal Activity 4

And with this film the Paranormal Activity series officially crashes into a brick wall. While not all the performances are bad, the plot has become an illogical mess that exists only to excuse the same story being told for the fourth time. It would be one thing if the series presented itself as an anthology, with Toby attacking different families, but they maintain just enough continuity to hint at a story they’re not telling us.

It’s the fourth film, and we’re given protagonists who know less than the characters from the first film, and far less than us. Keep in mind: the first movie started with Katie and Micah already aware that they were under attack by a demon. All subsequent films feature protagonists who begin with no idea that anything is wrong. At this point I’m ready for a film about Paranormal Investigators who’ve viewed all the previous tapes, and are actively searching for information on the fate of Hunter Rey.

Instead, we get the Nelson family: Skeptical father and mother, Doug and Holly (Stephen Dunham and Alexondra Lee), cute little son Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), and teenaged daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton). In short, the exact same cast from the second film, played by different actors, and with different names.

However, a mysterious boy named Robbie (Brady Allen) and his unseen mother move in across the street. We’re told Robbie’s mother has fallen ill and been taken to the hospital, so the Nelson’s agree to let Robbie stay with them…because taking in your neighbor’s kids at such times is perfectly normal. Robbie begins telling people about his imaginary friend Toby, painting weird symbols on Wyatt’s back, and generally acting creepy.

Now, given what I’ve just told you, imagine the most obvious twist that the filmmakers could possibly write. Did you come up with “Robbie is a Red Herring we’re supposed to think is Hunter, Wyatt was secretly adopted, and Robbie was sent by the coven to prepare Wyatt/Hunter?” Congratulations! You win absolutely nothing, because there wouldn’t be enough prizes to go around! Also, no extra points if you figured Robbie's “mother” was Katie (Katie Featherston).

As with 2, the teenage daughter begins to investigate, and what little of value can be found in this film is found there. I actually find Alex to be a bit more charming that Ali, and her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) takes an active role in the investigation. It’s a shame they never find out who Hunter Rey is, who the coven are, or any of the other information we already know. The only thing they do uncover is that a demonically possessed person will have to sacrifice a virgin, by tying virgin sacrifice to the symbol on Wyatt’s back. They may have intended us to think Robbie would sacrifice Wyatt, but by this point I already took Wyatt’s status as Hunter for granted, so it was painfully obvious it would be Alex getting axed. Mind you, we don't see the moment of sacrifice, so I can only assume the witches disabled her, and then had Hunter do the deed offscreen.

Most of the conventions of this series seem to be taken for granted now. Barely a word is given to justify the constant filming, and Toby moving things is barely noticed by the characters. Please consider: they review their videos enough to notice Robbie crawling into Alex’s bed while she’s asleep, but not enough to notice flying knives or self-starting cars.

The movie gets points for one of the more creative examples of product placement I’ve seen. The Kinect can apparently produce at least a vague image of Tobey using infrared light. It’s the first time in the series he’s been seen, so hooray!

That’s about all I have to say in this movie’s defense. The parents relation with their children is stilted and unnatural. While it’s true they’re supposed to be having marital problems, I never once believed these were people who actually knew each other. The movie has the same slow pacing as previous Paranormal Activity films, as we watch the characters fail to find out information the audience already knows.

In case you’re wondering the obvious, no, we never do find out why the coven put Hunter up for adoption. They clearly had plenty of people to take care of him, and it’s not like they’d have a lot of trouble finding a virgin for him to sacrifice. It’s just a plot contrivance to put us back with a suburban family in a story that should have moved beyond suburbia.

This film makes it clear just how much this franchise stagnated. The second film ended one night after the original, the third was a prequel. This was the film that should finally have started to move the story forward again, and tell us what happened to Hunter Rey. We technically get the answer, but it’s not a satisfying answer. Even as someone who isn’t a huge fan of the series, I think it deserves better than this.

Paranormal Activity 3

My criticisms of the Paranormal Activity series seem more closely tied together than any series I've previously reviewed. The fundamental problem from the first film, “who the hell chooses this format in the real world?” remains valid. However, I feel that Paranormal Activity 3 has the opposite problem from the second installment. While 2 made no sense from an in-Universe perspective, this film can pass the in-Universe test, while making no sense from a meta perspective.

This movie is a prequel, showing us footage from Katie and Kristi's (Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown) childhood, taken by their stepfather, Dennis (Chris Smith). I can understand how footage from decades ago might have taken longer for the documentarians to uncover, explaining why this is presented to us as a separate work (hell, with the cult at work I imagine his exploits getting the film could be a film in and of itself, since they're implied to have stolen these tapes in a brief scene of the future at the beginning). In-Universe this is the result of a continuing investigation.

However, for the audience in the real world, I'm not sure what this movie is supposed to bring to the table. We see that Katie and Kristi were haunted as children, which we were told in the previous films. The big reveal is that their Grandmother (Hallie Lois) made a deal with a demon...which is also exactly what the last film presented us with. In-universe this makes sense. The characters were speculating when we were first told this, and if I was watching a documentary on a real haunting I would want more proof than some girl Googling it on the Internet. This film gives us that visual confirmation that she was correct.

However we, the audience, have a much lower burden of proof. We have no reason to assume a fictional character was wrong, and would typically assume that the filmmaker would not present us with incorrect information unless it was to later be corrected. So, if we're going to have a prequel, I expect to find out that there were major details we were not privy to. Instead, we get a recounting of what we already know, given to us very slowly. Katie and Kristi live with their mother, Julie (Lauren Bittner), and the aforementioned stepfather. The parents are interrupted from making a sex-tap by an Earthquake, and reviewing the footage Dennis finds that the dust in the room is acting unusually, and decides to begin filming everything in the house.

I will give the movie props for at least acknowledging how expensive that many VHS tapes would have been in 1988. Grandma Lois complains about it to Julie about Dennis using her money to buy them. Obviously she has ulterior motives, but her attempts to get rid of Dennis by painting him as irresponsible don't come across as unreasonable.

On the other hand, Dennis is easily the most likable person in this series to date. For the most part, he doesn't do a single thing that he doesn't think will help his family (and never curses anyone, either). While he tries to humor Kristi as she talks to her “imaginary friend Toby,” Dennis shows increasing concern as the paranormal occurrences begin to mount. Kristi seem legitimately afraid of being in “trouble” with Toby, a symbol Dennis is able to tie to demonology appears in the girls' closet, and a babysitter (Johanna Braddy) quits in fear.

Dennis does share some similarities to Micah, and at times seem excited by the haunting. However, he never provokes the demon, or treats his stepdaughters as anything short of his top priority. When Toby is walking through his kitchen in a sheet, he's thrilled. When his friend Randy (Dustin Ingram) encounters a much less friendly Toby, scratching and throwing furniture, Dennis becomes Cassandra, trying to convince Julie that the girls aren't safe.

If this film does add something on the technical front, it's the use of a moving camera Dennis hooks up downstairs. It has the advantage of giving us a larger space to cover whenever we see its perspective, while also cutting away from the action and then returning to it again and again. During these scenes it's much harder to predict where the scare will come from, or even if it will be onscreen.

The ending of the movie is probably the only other clever thing in it. As it turns out, all the mysterious happenings actually served a function, unlike the previous films where Toby just messed around until he decided to possess someone. Toby wanted to drive them out of their house, so they would go to live with Grandma Lois. Once there, we get a series of scares, that ends with Toby killing both Julie and Dennis, leaving Lois free to raise the girls as she wants. Granted they would have gone to her if Toby killed the parents at home anyway, but it's something to add to the mythos.

...oh, and Kristi married Toby as a child. Not sure how the curse is any worse because it involved a marriage ceremony. I seriously doubt Toby consummated it, but maybe I'm just naïve. I'm actually somewhat curious if the marriage was transferred to Katie with the curse. And does this mean the second film was really about domestic abuse?

The movie would actually be far more entertaining if you haven't seen the first two films. For the most part it's competent, and the scares don't come quite as slowly as the previous installments. It's something of a transition point between the boring subtlety of the first film, and the sensationalism that Ghost Dimension will eventually become.

Paranormal Activity 2

Paranormal Activity 2, while far from the worst Found Footage movie I've seen, is practically an essay on everything that is wrong with the genre. Who is presenting us with this footage, and why did the person think that this was the format that made the most sense? The film starts well before the original movie, and ends a few hours later. The events are intimately tied together. So, why are we being shown these events as a separate film, when the in-universe filmmaker should have had access to this footage while making the original?

It's clear that there was editing done here. We're given text telling us what night it is, and at one point when Micah (Micah Sloat) appears we're even told by the text how many days until he dies. So, who is this bizarre documentarian who thinks this is a good format for informing the audience about these events?

For this film, the story revolves around the family of Katie's (Katie Featherston) sister Kristi (Sprague Gayden). This movie drops the pretense of naming characters after their actors. It works for a standalone film, but when expanding the world to include relatives and more characters it obviously becomes impractical.

Kristi is married to an older man named Daniel (Brian Boland). The two have just had their first child, Hunter (William Juan Prieto and Jackson Xenia Prieto). They share their house with an Hispanic nanny named Martine (Vivis Cortez) and Daniel's daughter from a previous relationship, Ali (Molly Ephraim). The dynamic here is actually pretty good. Rather than the drama and constant arguments of the previous film, we get a real sense that all of the people in this movie like each other. They disagree at times, but it's clear that they do so because they care.

This time the footage is from several sources. At the beginning of the film Daniel is documenting his new family. Shortly after Hunter's birth someone breaks in and vandalizes the house, causing Daniel to install security cameras to give us another perspective. Later in the film, as events become stranger and stranger, Ali takes it upon herself to document the events, and we get a perspective more focused on the supernatural.

The film actually starts out even more ambiguous than the first installment, and for a while it does work. We get a period of focusing on why the pool cleaner is coming out of the pool every night, and it's genuinely unclear if this is something the machine is capable of doing on it's own when the settings are wrong, or if this is a supernatural occurrence. I'm actually still not sure, having seen the movie twice in the past week.

By the end of the film, however, subtlety is thrown out the window. We've seen a baby levitated out of his crib, walk around the house, and go right back to where he started. We also get a detailed explanation of exactly how this curse got started: Katie and Kristi's grandmother made a deal with a demon for wealth, promising the first-born male child in her lineage. Given the amount of lore about demons, the idea that Ali was able to stumble onto the correct conclusion on her first time surfing the internet for answers is jaw-dropping...oh, and it also completely spoils the third film, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

The climax of the film actually seems to exist to spell out in pain-staking detail exactly what happened in the previous film and why. Apparently the demonic possession was intended for Kristi, so that she could abduct her son for the demon's purposes. However, Daniel found out from his house-keeper that the possession could be transferred to a blood relative, and so he cursed Katie, leading to the events of the original movie. However, after killing Micah, Katie came to Kristi and Daniel's home the next night, murders them both with her super-strength, and abducts Hunter herself. Ali, being away from the house at the time, survives to return several movies later.

This brings me full-circle back to my complaint: the previous film ended by telling us that Katie's whereabouts are unknown. If a documentary was made about these events, wouldn't “she killed her sister and brother-and-law and abducted their son before disappearing” have been a very relevant detail to include in the original?

As I said, this movie is far from the worst of this genre, or even this series. This is a point where effort still seems to have been made to provide us with something of quality. However, it also provides us with a textbook case of why this genre so rarely works well. Honestly, if you want to see Found Footage done correctly, see The Last Broadcast, a film that understands that the editor is a character within the story, and uses that to it's advantage.