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Review: Paranormal Activity 4

Found-footage that no one seems to find.

Try to imagine, if you can, a pervasive and annoying presence that is both terrible and incomprehensible. This force of nature destroys and ruins everything in its path. As you may have already guessed, I just described the plot of Paranormal Activity 4. What you may have not yet realized is that I also described the movie franchise as a whole.

Paranormal Activity 4 (PA4) is, to put it kindly, a clusterfuck of senseless situations, shallow scares, and superfluous spying. This installment of the saga takes place 5 years after the events of the second movie. It follows the day to day life of an unsuspecting family as their lives are disrupted when they decide to watch a little neighbor boy while his mother is in the hospital. Suspecting the little boy’s involvement in the strange phenomenon plaguing their house, the teenage daughter sets up hidden cameras and rigged computers to record everything. With the help of her boyfriend, a night vision camera, and an X-Box Kinect, she sets out to prove that there is more going on than meets the eye. Those who have seen any of the previous three films know exactly what happens next.

PA4 quickly does away with the pretext of having a coherent story. Not only does it not add to the unstable mythos the franchise is attempting to create, but the film basically surrenders when it comes to providing (logical) explanations for any of the events taking place. Throughout the movie, I felt I had to guess at or make assumptions as to what was going on. You don’t even discover the family owns a cat until it is used to scare you, repeatedly.

Story aside, this film would have been watchable if it didn’t follow an almost formulaic approach to how they try to get their scares. It has been presented the exact same way, so many times before, that we can accurately predict when something is going to jump out at us. At least 50 percent of the time it will be a pet.

Paranormal Activity 4 fails on every conceivable level, including as a found-footage film. I mean, who is finding the footage we’re watching and why haven’t they been intelligent enough to put the pieces together? All these questions and more might be vaguely touched upon in the inevitable Paranormal Activity 5. Frankly, some things aren’t worth knowing.

Mitchell Wells

Founder and Editor in Chief of Horror Society. Self proclaimed Horror Movie Freak, Tech Geek, love indie films and all around nice kinda guy!!

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