Paranormal Activity 4

 

Maybe Toby (the name of the malevolent invisible entity that has been terrifying hapless suburbanites through four Paranormal Activity movies now) just doesn't have his heart in his work anymore.  There's something very workmanlike and by the numbers about the scares in Paranormal Activity 4.  Of course, if the last movie is to be believed, he's been doing this kind of stuff to these people since 1988.  Maybe he needs a break.  After watching this particularly lifeless sequel, I know I could go for one from this franchise.

If you'll recall, the original movie introduced us to young couple, Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah, who started videotaping the ghostly happenings around their house.  The first sequel took us back in time, to further explain Katie's connections with the ghostly goings-on, as well as introduce us to her sister Kristi, whose newborn baby Hunter became a target of the demon.  In Paranormal Activity 3, we went back even further in time to when Katie and Kristi were kids, and this whole mess started.  Now, with the latest film, we have some new victims for Toby to haunt.  Unfortunately, we don't really learn anything new about the increasingly convoluted plot that the series has been building.  Maybe that's a good thing, but at the same time, it feels like the latest entry is just treading water.  We're seeing the same stuff we've seen in the previous movies, and not really learning anything new.

The focus this time is a perky young teenage girl named Alex, played by the talented young Kathryn Newton.  Her performance is the sole bright spot in an otherwise fairly dim movie.  Alex lives in a affluent suburb with her family, which includes her feuding parents, and a baby brother named Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).  She also has a boyfriend (Matt Shively) who is good with hooking up computers and video equipment.  That will be important once strange and unexplained things start happening around Alex's home.  Alex's personal paranormal activity starts up when a little boy from across the street named Robbie (Brady Allen) comes to live with her family after his mom is sent to the hospital under mysterious circumstances.  Before too long, the chandeliers and doors in Alex's house are moving and opening by themselves, kitchen cutlery is disappearing, little Robbie starts wandering around the house in the middle of the night, and strikes up a bizarre secret friendship with Wyatt, painting ancient demonic symbols on the kid's back.

Not much builds, and we don't get a lot of tension as these events unfold.  We get a lot of shots of empty rooms, and the occasional piece of furniture moving by itself, but that's about it.  The odd thing is, despite the fact that Alex is catching all this stuff on tape, she doesn't make a very big effort to show anyone this stuff.  She makes a halfhearted attempt to make her parents watch in one scene, but when they ignore her, she never brings it up again.  You would think having film footage of Alex being trapped in a garage that turns into a literal death trap would be proof enough that something is very wrong in this house.  Oddly, she doesn't even try to show this footage to anyone.  And we once again have the central question I often find myself asking during these movies - Why is Alex taping a lot of this stuff in the first place?  Yes, I know, she's trying to record the activity.  But, she makes such a limited effort to show what she captures to others, you kind of wonder what the point of it all is, and why she carries her laptop computer everywhere she goes.

 None of this would matter if the scares were any good, but unfortunately, this turns out to be the least-tense film in the series.  This is a huge surprise, considering directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, and screenwriter Christopher Landon all worked on the much scarier third entry of the franchise.  That movie had some clever ideas, such as the inventive oscillating fan camera.  Here, everybody seems to be on autopilot.  We don't only learn anything new about the overall story of the series, but the characters are not really developed in any real way.  They just kind of hang around, until it's time for them to meet the invisible and ever-present Toby.  What slight scares the movie does aim for are of the perfunctory variety, such as something suddenly jumping in front of the camera (such as the family cat), or a shadowy figure moving just out of frame.

 

I doubt even fans of the series will find much to get excited about here.  It's a sluggish and anemic take on an idea that has been kind of fun up until now, but should probably be put to rest before it becomes too much of a self-parody.  Unless the filmmakers come up with some really killer ideas for next year's inevitable Paranormal Activity 5, I say it's time to give Toby the rest he deserves.

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