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.

Wednesday Review: Nerve

It’s interesting to note that I saw Nerve the day after the Nostalgia Critic posted his video “Can a Movie be so Good it’s Bad?” If there ever was such a film, it’s Nerve. This is a movie that’s begging to be turned into entertaining trash, and yet it’s been filled with talented actors and polished to a shine, then capped off with a touching love story.

All of this material would be great…in another movie. In this one, however, it’s just boring. The premise of this movie is that a girl played by the ever-talented Emma Roberts is utterly terrified of taking any risks. After her best friend embarrasses her in front of her crush, she decides In an effort to sign up for the titular online game where “Watchers” pay “Players” increasing amounts of money for escalating series of dares. While her goal is simply to do a single dare to prove she isn’t a coward, over the course of the night the game slowly turning her into more and more of an adrenaline junkie.

She finds herself teamed up with a mysterious man played by Dave Franco at the insistence of the Watchers. Despite this movie’s failure, it’s actually convinced me that Dave is the more talented of the Franco brothers. He sells every scene he’s in, managing to make himself likable, without ever losing his air of mystery until the movie is ready to tell us his backstory.

In a movie dealing with a game played through the internet it goes without saying that hackers will become involved. I’ll say that Hollywood has definitely taken major strides towards understanding how computers work. Some things still don’t make sense to me, but Bitcoin doesn’t make sense to me either, so I’m not going to stand on my high horse and claim that I know anything in this movie to be wrong.

The movie really suffers in the area of pacing. Firstly, there’s definitely room for sexual tension here, treating our protagonists like a serious blossoming romance just slows the film down. Secondly, the dares seem too episodic, ending far too cleanly. For one perfect example: When our heroes are forced to flee a clothing store into the streets of New York in their underwear to avoid shoplifting, the Watchers made sure new clothing was waiting for them when they got out. This means the dare doesn’t disadvantage them in any way going forward.

This is a movie that should be mounting insanity, as we see our heroine worn down and destroyed by the game, even as she grows addicted to it. Seeing her at the end, with her hair still perfect, we’re not really given any indication that she’s changed as a person. If anything, the changes the film shows us are entirely positive, which hardly plays into a movie that builds its entire premise around the cesspool that is anonymous internet culture.

On the flip side, the only character who poses loosely as an antagonist gets minimal screen time, none of which is used to do anything especially villainous. So at the end of the film, when we’re supposed to be afraid of him, I found myself utterly indifferent because the movie had done nothing to establish him as more than just another player. If anything, he comes across as likable and savvy to the game.

As with the rest of the film, the ending is far too neat, wrapping everything up in a nice bow. Quite frankly, the idea that this story could end so easily seems preposterous. It’s like Donald Trump’s promise to “shut down parts of the internet.” The viral destruction of people’s lives doesn’t end quickly or easily, and if you don’t believe me just ask Zoe Quinn.

It’s hard to say I don’t recommend this movie, just for the characters. Beyond that, however, it doesn’t feel like the movie I was promised. Maybe I should have been tipped off by the lack of an R-rating, but this shouldn’t be a movie where people talk about their feelings and the ethical use of technology. It should be a movie where these things are seen through implication.