PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4

Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Unsettling sounds are moving through another Southern California residence in the third follow-up to the original PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.  

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 picks up where the third one left off.  Katie and her nephew Hunter have fled from the confines of their old home, and have moved to a new place.  Another family begins experiencing the same sounds, sights and horrors that troubled Katie and Hunter.  

This time, most of the creeps haunt a pair of high school students, Alex and Ben, who much like the participants in the first three PARANORMAL films, begin to document their experiences through a series of computer cameras.

 

The beauty of the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, and I’d argue to a lesser extent, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 was its simplicity.  In these two films, the effort and execution was focused on the things that go bump in the night, an object of two that would move and eventually the climax would reveal something a bit more.  

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 again uses this same framework, but often times gets distracted with the built in mythology established in the last two films.  The mythology is present, but the mystery is gone, as we now know what is going bump in the night and also what it is leading up to.  

All may have been forgiven had the creepy night time scenes been paramount, and less time had been devoted to foolish teenagers and their preoccupied parents.  The acting and writing have never been these films drawing cards, but PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 exposes these aspects as a liability.  Teens are left to carry the dramatic weight, and screenwriter Christopher Landon felt that a series of f-bombs were the best way to convey their despair.  

Kathryn Newton as Alex fares much better than her male counterpart, the sexually-charged Ben, played by Matt Shively, who’s range is limited, but the older and younger actors are even worse.  Creepy kids are now more a cliché than they are genuinely terrifying, and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY  4’s kids are more likely to illicit laughs than shrieks.  

In many ways, the same can be said for the film as a whole.  PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 is a tired exercise that attempts to expand the scope of the series, but ends up diminishing it.  

Grade: D