With PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4, we see the decline of a once fresh and robust franchise into something dull and predictable. Worse, with this installment, we see the franchises transition into yet another entry into the slasher genre.
The tale is still told via rough cinema-verite footage from surveillance cameras and other assorted forms of home video. Its five years on from the last film when Katie (Katie Featherstone) went on a killing rampage and kidnapped her infant nephew, Hunter). Its 2011, and there is a new family involved, slowly coming to the realization that Robbie (Brady Allen) the spooky six-year-old from across the street has brought something more than his stuffed animals with him during his stay after his mother is taken away in an ambulance. Never a favorite with Alex (Kathryn Newton), the nubile 15-year-old daughter of the household, Robbie nonetheless forms a disturbing bond with Alexs brother, Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), one that involved the requisite invisible friend and peculiar goings-on in the house that cant quite be explained away with a non-paranormal explanation. When her parents refuse to believe Alex when she claims that things are not as they should be, Alex arranged with her libidinous but sweet boyfriend, Ben (Matt Shively), to turn the conveniently numerous and ubiquitous computers in the spacious home into surveillance cameras, providing footage that is, often as not, seen by the audience, but not by Alex or her family. If only she had managed to work out the steps of turning the raw data into video files, people would have started believing her sooner. Then again, that would have made for a more interesting movie on a par with the first in the franchise.
Alas, the elements that made that one so effective are all but ignored here. It was the way in that film that the supernatural frayed at the very edges of the characters otherwise routine, even humdrum, reality that created the almost unbearable suspense. And, as in that film, it is the small things that work the best magic. A line of toys in an empty hallway; a book falling from a bookcase. Things that can be explained away, but ultimately dont add up. Here, chandeliers dont just swing, they crash. Garage doors dont just go wonky, they precipitate mortal combat. The profligate use of special effects begins far too early, and has the opposite effect than that intended, that of heightening the suspense and terror. The use of the fantastic puts the audience back into a comfort zone of unreality, allowing it to avoid the primal fear that comes of unidentified bumps in the night, or order disarrayed just enough to send warning signals but not enough to identify a specific, even comforting cause, even if that cause is a malicious and incorporeal entity. Its the unknown that is truly, deeply terrifying, and the first film knew that, not just working around its low budget, but making that lack of funding an incomparable virtue.
To their credit, co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman, they of the infuriatingly wonderful documentary, CATFISH, have maintained the unstudied, spontaneous sensibility of people reacting without though to having a camera on them, and what works best in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 is due to their work with the cast. Its the script that defeats them all with its failure to find anything fresh in the material.
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