![]() ![]() Everything is a fake-out jump scare in the long, limp first hour. Returning screenwriter Christopher Landon stuffs his plate with garnish to distract that there’s not much of a meal here. But then the disturbances intensify in unimaginatively familiar ways. At first, they show evidence of Robbie creepily crawling into Alex’s bed or whispering in the den under the Kinect’s neon-green pointillist tracking dots. Then come the night thuds, the tumbling chandeliers and the cameras - 24-hour feeds Matt established through linked laptops and the Xbox. And as he becomes friends with Wyatt, the oddities Wyatt exhibited as a baby resurface. How else to explain two credited black actors on IMDB in a movie with nothing but white faces?)Īfter the new neighbor lady next door goes to the hospital (no points for guessing who she is), the family temporarily takes in her son, Robbie (Brady Allen) - a moppet plucked from the Creepy Kid bin at Central Casting.Īll grim pronouncements and glowering looks, Robbie even has a “magic fork” that can “tell the future” (which we see once and never again). But why linger long on natural teen talents when there are lambs to be led to slaughter? (Like most of these movies, much was probably left on the cutting-room floor. Here, Newton and Shively have an organic give-and-take, struggling to remain upbeat amid the urges and uncertainties at the cusp of adulthood. The more these movies go on, the fundamentally nicer its protagonists have been. She’s a good big sis to little Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) and remains chastely flirtatious despite the pleadings of her tech-savvy boyfriend, Ben (Matt Shively) - who’s around so often he seems to have a key. This movie jumps ahead five years to a different family in a different city.Īlex (Kathryn Newton) is a 15-year-old girl whose parents (Alexondra Lee and Stephen Dunham) may be divorcing. And we know their ancestors, in exchange for wealth, promised Toby (or his boss, Ol’ Scratch) the family’s firstborn son, which Hunter turns out to be. We know Katie’s grandmother indoctrinated her and her sister in witchy ways as children. Part four is the first true sequel, after a parallel plot in “2” (still the series’ pinnacle) and a legitimate prequel in “3.” A recap: Possessed by Toby, Katie (Katie Featherston) killed her fiancé, sister and brother-in-law (but not her step-niece) before kidnapping her nephew, Hunter, and going missing from Carlsbad, California in 2006. And the “Paranormal” franchise now feels like its own plug-and-play product, with as simple a way to reformat its narrative hard drive as it sees fit. Cameras here are embedded in laptops, iPhones and Xbox Kinects, with all the shameless product placement that goes along with it. Plus, the few drops of novelty left in the first-person approach - given old-school jolts via oscillating fan in “3” by returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman - are wrung dry. And when he does go after people, it’s the anticlimactic ragdoll yank-and-snap you’ve seen in the two previous films. Here, he just makes a knife disappear, causes laptops to whir and blocks paths with chairs. He once had the gumption to work his way up to a murderous frenzy by bashing a German Shepherd, upending a kitchen in broad daylight and clawing a cameraman’s flesh. And here, Toby - the jovially innocuous name of a deadly demon at the center of the series’ destruction and death - has just gotten lazy. Outside of fleetingly clever bursts, this franchise has never been able to sustain its scares. It’s déjà boo all over again with “Paranormal Activity 4.” And the returns in this franchise of first-person POV frights remain as depressing as they are diminishing.
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