By Jason Haskins
The creative door has officially been slammed on the Paranormal Activity franchise, which began quite humbly back in 2009 when it first scared audiences. Coincidentally, this whole door slamming business has also been done in all of our collective faces with the most recent third film where the filmmakers literally disrespect us all.
Paranormal Activity 3 serves more as a prequel to the other two movies showing us how the two sisters, Katie and Kristi, were haunted as children in 1988. It all starts with Kristi’s imaginary friend, Toby, who all of a sudden starts to hold precedence in daily life, prompting her stepfather, Dennis, to put up VHS (hey!) cameras all around the house to chronicle what strange happenings are taking place. And there we have the premise of the third film, which sounds quite a bit like the other two, huh?
It’s not that I don’t like this fly-on-the-wall type of engineering in terms of direction. In fact, I think that it really works to create suspense (especially in a few key sequences involving an oscillating fan), but much of the movie felt familiar to me. There are a small pinch of surprises and scenes of utter suspense, but I felt like the film wasn’t as scary as the other two—it relied on hyped expectations to scare the audience instead of simply doing it by business of show.
The worst part about this experience for me was how there are several moments in the full-length trailer that aren’t even in Paranormal Activity 3. I can’t even begin to tell you how cheated I was because these scenes were what captured my attention and made me excited to see this. There was no fire, no mother being thrown backwards, no girl jumping off the banister, etc.—all of that stuff is fluff and doesn’t appear in the film. One of my friends went as far to say that he wanted his money back. This is a straight case of false advertising or hardcore editing problems during post-production that made them want to change things completely. Or, knowing this industry, it was left on the cutting room floor for the anticipated fourth installment. Oy vey.
As for the story, this is by far the weakest movie in the series. It’s quite short and ends before it truly gets started. Beyond this, the third act wasn’t handled very well. The overall climax was very disappointing and predictable, taking on this persona that reminded me too much of The Last Exorcism. It wasn’t original and totally degrades what we saw in the first two movies much in the same way Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers tried to change the franchise negatively. The explanation of all this paranormal activity (hey!) is plain stupid. Don’t even get me started on the continuity errors that run rampant throughout the movie—jarring inconsistencies that were distracted and poorly handled by the filmmakers.
Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, fresh off their successful documentary Catfish, didn’t provide the amount of life I was expecting. There are some admittedly great moments, but they didn’t come along as much as I would’ve wanted. All of the acting, particularly from the kids, was very good, but all of the other peripheral stuff wasn’t up to par. There are lackluster special effects particularly in a hair-pulling scene that was flabbergasting in how bad it was.
Overall, I was very disappointed by what this movie offered—it’s quickly going the way of the Saw franchise in terms of the whole one-movie-a-year premise. Because of how bad this was, I hope they take next year off to perhaps work on things a little bit, but knowing Hollywood (and the massive returns this movie has brought) there’s no doubt a fourth is already being written. However, will I be there next year?
2 out of 5 stars
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