Starring: Christopher Nicholas Smith, Lauren Bittner, Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown
Directed By: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Screenplay By: Christopher B. Landon
Produced By: Jason Blum, Oren Peli and Steven Schneider
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Rating: R
Running Time: 85 minutes
Website: www.paranormalmovie.com
Budget: $5 million
Genre: Horror
Release Date: October 21, 2011
When faced with the challenge of a microscopic $15,000 budget for the original Paranormal Activity, director Oren Peli was forced to get creative. By grafting a “found footage” conceit onto a simple haunted house story, Peli was able to turn the drawbacks of independent filmmaking – limited locations, lower-quality equipment, unknown actors, nonexistent special effects budgets – into his greatest strengths. Taking cues from 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Peli earned his most effective scares by letting the audience’s imagination do the heavy lifting.
Fueled by a runaway hype machine focused solely on cartoonish audience reactions from a series of successful midnight screenings, Paranormal Activity trounced the fourth installment of the dwindling Saw series, going on to gross nearly $200 million worldwide. Knowing a franchise when they saw it, Paramount immediately ordered a $3 million sequel with a new director to debut the following Halloween. It followed the same formula and story beats as the original, adding additonal camera angles and some limp mythology the studio could exploit in Halloween-targeted installments for years.
What Paranormal Activity 3 lacks in camera angles, it more than makes up for in ham-handed mythology. After a brief and highly unnecessary present-day introduction featuring Katie and Kristi, (the sisters from the first two films), the movie shifts to the year 1988. There we meet the younger versions of the sisters (Chloe Csengery & Jessica Tyler Brown), as well as their mother (Lauren Bittner) and her new boyfriend (Christopher Nicholas Smith), the first of many obsessive-compulsive videographers in the girls’ lives.
After a lame attempt at a sex tape captures an unexplained presence on his tape, Smith wastes no time in setting up VHS cameras in the bedroom, the girls’ room – even one strapped to an oscillating fan to reveal intermittent peeks at the kitchen and living room. His assistant (Dustin Ingram), a Shaggy-esque bit of comic relief, points out the insanity of reviewing 12 hours of surveillance footage every day, but Smith is not to be deterred, going so far as to even film himself reviewing the footage (lucky for us!).
Though his efforts capture increasingly-obvious evidence of a haunting, Smith refuses to let the girls’ mother in on the secret, fearing she may force him to stop filming every second of their lives. Instead, he checks out some library books on demonology, which provide him (and the audience) with the barest hint of exposition. It seems young Kristi’s imaginary friend Toby is actually a demonic presence that lives in the attic crawlspace, feeds on fear and may (or may not) want to bone one (or both) of the little girls (or someone’s first-born son – it’s all a little vague).
Eventually, even Toby gets fed up with the amount of boring, drawn-out sequences in the film, and starts full-on assaulting everything in sight: he scratches house guests, pulls the girls by their hair, flings bodies across the room and levitates an entire kitchenette. Accepting that Toby is more than just a phase Kristi is going through, the girls’ mother agrees to flee to the safety of her mother’s country estate. There, Smith continues filming every moment of the film’s ludicrous, Wicker Man-like climax with a surprisingly steady hand, always managing to frame his shots perfectly, even as he runs through darkened, unfamiliar hallways carrying a small child.
Where the original Paranormal Activity had a certain sloppiness that lent itself to the home movie conceit, the third installment is so calculated that its gimmicks are more apparent. Directors Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, famous for the cloying documentary hoax Catfish, expertly direct the audience’s attention with their choice of editing and framing. The oscillating camera, with its deliberate, glacial repetition, is particularly effective at building tension, even (or especially) when nothing’s actually happening. It is a fine trick, but nothing more.
There is a difference between scaring somebody and startling them. While Paranormal Activity 3 features an overabundance of sudden shocks, the film never manages any real scares. That’s partly because the majority of those shocks have nothing to do with the supernatural and partly because the movie reverts to a strangely comic tone when not actively trying to surprise the audience. That leaves the film the equivalent of a cheap carnival ride: Halloween audiences looking for nothing more than a few BOO!s while being led down a rickety track will likely come away entertained. Anyone seeking genuine scares would be better off re-renting the original.
2 Stars (out of 5)
,
