Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

Over the six or so years it has been running, the Paranormal Activity franchise has gone from being a creepy little novelty, to a nearly annual Halloween annoyance.  It's like that visitor or family member who stops by every Halloween.  They used to be fun, and you kind of still tolerate them, but you're starting to dread their visit when the season starts to come around, because they keep on talking about the same stuff and pulling the same tricks every time they visit.  The latest (and supposedly final) entry, The Ghost Dimension, does nothing new other than add some gimmicky 3D and CG effects that add nothing to the experience.  Unless you've been dying to know how this stuff ends, you can skip this one.  And even if you have been dying to know, you're probably better off not knowing, because it's nothing special.

In this latest installment, we are introduced to a new family of victims.  They live in a huge, luxurious home, even though nobody ever seems to work or go to school.  That would get in the way of being able to film and videotape the latest antics of Toby, the malevolent demon who has been terrorizing hapless suburbanites for the entire series.  The family includes dad Ryan (Chris J. Murray), mom Emily (Brit Shaw), their sweet little eight-year old Leila (Ivy George), Ryan's slacker brother Mike (Dan Gill), and sister Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley).  Now that you know everybody's names, you know everything the movie ever tells us about these people.  While decorating the house for Christmas, Mike happens to find a box with an old fashioned camcorder and a bunch of tapes.  Ryan becomes strangely fascinated with the device, especially when he finds out that it has special equipment added to it that allows the camera to film spirits.  As soon as he picks up the camera, he begins to notice swirling masses of ghostly forms all about the house, particularly around his sweet daughter, Leila.  Does he do anything about this, or become concerned for the safety of his family?  Of course not.  He just goes right on shooting, saying things like "this is weird" over and over.

No prizes for guessing if the demonic Toby is somehow behind all the paranormal shenanigans that starts happening all over the house.  He's hatched a new plan that is tied around little Leila.  We learn that her birth date has some kind of connection to past events in the series.  This leads to a not-explained-very-well plot that has something to do with time travel, space and time portals appearing on the wall behind Leila's bed, and Toby attempting to become human so that he can take over the world, or something along those lines.  His true motivation is never really revealed.  For all I know, he wants to be human so that he can be first in line at the big weekend sale at the local Target store.  Ryan and Mike spend a good part of the film's running time watching the old tapes that they found in the box with the camera.  The tapes contain footage from a lot of the earlier movies (mainly Paranormal Activity 3).  So, what this means is that we spend a good part of this movie watching characters who are watching footage of the movies we've already seen.

The people in Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension are incredibly dumb, even by the standards of a horror movie.  They set up cameras all over the house in order to record what's going on, but they hardly ever actually check the footage that they capture.  They seemingly set up the cameras just so a cheap looking CG swirling black mass that is supposed to represent the demon can bum rush the screen over and over again in a series of ineffective and easily telegraphed jump scares.  And even after they figure out that whatever is haunting them is targeting their little girl, they still let the kid sleep alone in her room so that Toby can get to her while everybody is asleep.  To be fair, the mom does sleep on the floor of the kid's room at one point, but she immediately stops after that.  And when they finally get the idea in their heads to leave the house and stay in a motel (long after any sane person would while experiencing what these people go through, mind you), they immediately come back home so that they can do a little more investigating.  This is one of those movies that make you want to scream not-so-nice things to the people up on the screen.

The big gimmick this time around is that the audience gets to actually see the spirits for the first time, as Toby has previously largely been invisible in the earlier movies.  What this amounts to, sadly, is a lot of low rent CG effects that look like they came from a straight to DVD horror film.  The movie is also being presented for the first time in 3D.  I saw the movie in good old fashioned 2D, so I can't judge how well the effects are pulled off, but I would not get my hopes up.  Because the movie is designed to be in 3D, we get a ton of gimmicky shots of things flying at our face and knocking the camera over.  That's certainly not worth the extra charge to see this in an extra dimension, if you ask me.  This whole enterprise comes across as being so lazy, I'm sure the added effects aren't that special to begin with.

I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that this will be the last Paranormal Activity movie, as the filmmakers claim.  I know with time there will be a reboot, or an attempt to start a new storyline once interest in the franchise begins to build again.  When that time comes, I can only hope that the films come up with a new gimmick, and don't run it into the ground like they did with this original series.  Although, again, I'm not enough of an optimist to assume they won't.

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