Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  Finishing off my PA round-up.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 - The series takes a detour into the lives of some other boring suburbanites who live in a similar house. This time there's a sinister child from across the road - will he bring supernatural doom to the etcetc Maybe all the box office competition from the wave of 'Insidious' clones (arguably semi-inspired by the original 'Paranormal Activity' anyway) sharpened the makers' pencils a bit, because I found 'Paranormal Activity 4' quite effectively eerie in patches, with a nicely sustained build up and enough little visual skits to offset the expected rattling and glimpses of people running past doorways. The ending's a bit meh, but if it's the journey that counts then this one's pretty good.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES - Part five. Two goofballs get on the wrong side of the woman downstairs; she's pretty good at dark sorcery, so that's their hard luck really. I suppose half the point of being a kid these days is that you're a twenty-four-hour recording device anyway, meaning the 'need excuse for camera' thing is pretty much catered for there. Apart from the slight levity provided by the two doofuses at the heart of this demonic shitstorm, it only really stretches beyond the series's basic pattern when it stages a frenetic runaround in the occultist's hangout at the end, a climactic blowout that's quite atmospheric if you like big shadowy rooms full of furniture covered in sheets and rocking horse silhouettes in windows (I do). Seems quite well regarded by some - me, I thought it was OK.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION - I pretend not to be influenced by what people say but I am really, so as the credits rolled I put my growing feeling of apprehension down to the fact that the general consensus on 'The Ghost Dimension' is that it's shite. Did I try to prove the naysayers in my head wrong? After I clocked all the shit CGI, I'm not sure I did. The problem with 'The Ghost Dimension' is that it trades what 'Paranormal Activity' does well - ham-fisted 'suggestive' spookery that looks alright when geed up by the false urgency of found footage - for a stab at something that could only ever reveal it as the poor relation of a James Wan-involved flick. Usually I can find the good in the truly bad, but this sits more in the category of films that are too bland to be worth fighting for. The backstory felt unwieldy and silly too. Actually, I fell asleep for quite a bit of it. I must stop talking about it now.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: NEXT OF KIN - Well, it looks like I've made it. I have to admit, I had a lot more fun when I did the 'Friday The 13th' and 'Nightmare On Elm Street' binges last year, but now I'm at the top of the mountain the journey here doesn't seem so bad. And we leave things on a relative high, as 'Next Of Kin' is actually pretty good. A documentarian visits a religious community somewhere deep in the sticks to film her newfound biological family, who claim to be Amish. Just look at those big sinister barns, though - might these symbols of archetypal midwestern horror be hiding some kind of awful secret? 'Next Of Kin' builds slowly and follows firmly in the footsteps of its forebears in ticking off a plethora of low wattage bump-in-the-night cliches on the way, but, and I know this defeats the object a bit, at least it has the poise, feel and aesthetics of a 'proper film'; no scummy mid noughts trash cams here. More to the point, those sinister barns, the desolate location, the midnight gatherings in the church in the woods all boil up a fairly menacing atmosphere in places, enough to make the running around at the end feel like a pay-off. It works pretty much as a standalone film too, so I wouldn't really blame non-PA completists for skipping most of what lies between this and the first one. |