I had to take a couple of days off from this for personal reasons, and when it came time to get back into things with the next film in the series I found myself really not looking forward to it. As I've already said, I thought that they had wrapped things up quite well with the ending of Paranormal Activity 2, and then again with Paranormal Activity 3. So I really couldn't see where they were going to go with the story with Paranormal Activity 4.
It's Halloween 2011, five years after the events of the first two films (and 23 years after the third, in case you're counting), and we're now following a new family, which includes six-year-old Wyatt and his teenage sister Alex. In a change from the previous films, this time it's a female protagonist who's obsessed with filming everything, although she's helped in this by her friend and would-be boyfriend Ben. When new neighbours move in across the road from them it isn't long before they meet one of them, Robbie, a somewhat odd child who nethertheless becomes friends with Wyatt despite Alex's misgivings. Robbie ends up staying with the family for several nights after his mother is allegedly taken into hospital, and once he's there strange things start happening almost immediately - from strange noises to disappearing and reappearing knives and falling chandeliers - not to mention Robbie's invisible friend Toby. Just who are Robbie and his mother, and just what do they want with Wyatt?
Well, I think we can safely say that the fridge has been well and truly nuked in this series now. It's ridiculously clear that we're all supposed to think that Robbie is actually a six-year-old Hunter, so no-one should be surprised at all when it turns out to be Wyatt instead. Regardless of any inevitable revelations in the film though, the plot to Paranormal Activity 4 is a hot mess: why has Toby and/or the coven (because yes, of course they're back too) waited five years before launching into the next stage of their plan, especially when they clearly had everything they wanted at the end of the second movie? The whole set-up for this movie seems ridiculously contrived and reliant on way too many variables to happen just right for things to work. How come no-one has recognised Katie for the last five years, seeing as she's clearly not hiding (she's even top billing in the credits)? How is Alex and Wyatt's mother so unbelievably and willfully blind to what is going on around her and neglectful of her children? And where the hell did Robbie come from? Does the coven rent out children for special occasions?
I could go on with these questions, but I think I've made my point. Tl;dr - the plot for this movie is a disaster.
This time around, Paranormal Activity 4 is shot mainly with webcams and chat windows, with one additional camera with night vision for that eerie green glow that we've come to expect from found-footage films. The movie's big tech gimmick this time though is the use of an XBox Kinect sensor, which makes everyone look like they have radioactive smallpox when the camera is in night vision mode, but also picks things up that the regular camera mode can't see. So we get glimpses of what we can assume to be Toby the unfortunately-named demon, and he appears to be either a tall black shadow or a small boy, possibly depending on his mood. To be fair, the Kinect-o-Vision is a nice touch and a clever use of technology, but it's also quite clearly nothing more than a one-off gimmick, to be used for this movie and then never spoken of again.
We also learn a few more things about Toby the demon himself in this movie. He now knows how to use a computer to change passwords (thus explaining away why no-one looks at the recorded footage of supernatural things happening and promptly runs out of the house screaming), doesn't seem to mind cats and strangely isn't too fond of gore, as shown with a sequence involving a kitchen knife flying up to the ceiling in one scene and then teasing us with the possibility of it falling down again and impaling someone for several more scenes, but it chickens out at the last moment. But at least that sequence actually does deliver on the promise of Chekov's Kitchen Knife; earlier on in the movie Robbie shows us his "special fork" that he's brought with him and I spent the rest of the film waiting for it to come back into play. Nothing. He doesn't even eat with it, let alone stab anyone with it, and we've talked before about the dangers of putting things into your film that you're just not going to bother to explain or bring up again. It only worked for the three seashells because that was the joke.
Paranormal Activity 4 is the point in the Paranormal Activity series where all but the most die-hard of fans have probably stopped and said, "Yeah, this sequel didn't really add anything to the series." And aside from cash, it doesn't - it brings nothing new to the series mythos other than questions; it relies on characters being remarkably stupid and/or self-absorbed to move the plot along, and it's clearly coasting on the success of the previous films. And yet this isn't even the end...
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