After time-traveling back to the '80s in 'Paranormal Activity 3,' this fourth installment in the highly-profitable, found-footage horror franchise begins with yet another gimmicky flashback. This time it's to 2006, as a toddler is abducted by his Aunt Katie (Katie Featherson), who has murdered her sister Kristi.
Returning to November, 2011, it follows the Nelsons, a suburban Nevada family caring for a creepy six year-old Robbie neighbor (Brady Allen), whose single mother, Mrs. Torrance (a.k.a. Katie), has suddenly been hospitalized. Bickering Doug (Stephen Dunham) and Holly (Alexandra Lee) Nelson have two children: Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), who is also six, and his 15 year-old sister, Alex (Kathryn Newton).
It's a bit strange that brooding Robbie has a malevolent friend, the invisible demon Toby, with whom he constantly converses - and that Wyatt rides his Big Wheel around the house following the supernatural presence. It's also weird that computer-compulsive Alex and her tech-savvy, Skype-chatting boyfriend, Ben (Matt Shively), set up motion-sensing webcams all over the house to acquire the bizarre found-footage.
Screenwriter Christopher Landon and directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who collaborated on the previous installment, utilize far too many generic shots of inexplicably opening and/or slamming doors, dark hallways, and distant noises, along with the family cat ominously scampering past the camera for sudden surprise. The only cinematic innovation introduced in this low-budget sequel is the use of the Xbox Kinect video game system, which covers everything with a ghostly matrix of tiny green projection dots that are only visible on an infrared camera. So expect lots of menacing surveillance footage, very little of which has any significance and some of which elicits laughter. And the potential of a neighborhood coven of witches is never fully explored.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Paranormal Activity 4" drops to a stale, derivative 2, dedicated to the memory of Stephen Dunham, Alexandra Lee's real-life husband, who recently died of a heart attack.
They say that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it, and, as a former high school chalk-pusher I heartily agree. In Craig Zisk's 'The English Teacher,' the title character teaches the likes of 'A Tale of Two Cities' while some of the greats taped to the walls like Mark Twain overlook the c ...
F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous 1925 American novel, set in the sizzling, sexy bacchanal of Jazz Age New York, is now in the cinematic realm of Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann, who turned Paris's Belle Epoque into 'Moulin Rouge' and transformed 'William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.' ...
If you can get over the repetitions of Harry Warren and Jack Brooks's 1952 song 'T'at's Amore,' which is neither Italian nor Danish, you may find a few things to like about Susanne Bier's 'Love is All You Need,' which takes place in Copenhagen and Sorrento. Though filled with other cliches of the r ...
Opening with a narration by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), this chapter in the lucrative billionaire-turned-superhero franchise starts with a flashback to his earlier life as a brash-but-brilliant playboy, spending New Year's Eve, 1999, in Berne, Switzerland with scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall ...
View Local News Sources From 33,000+ Neighborhoods Nationwide!
Paranormal Activity 4 - Stale, Derivative
