Directors: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
Cast: Katie Featherston, Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively
Running Time: 88 minutes
Certificate: 15
Synopsis: Five years after Katie disappeared with her nephew Hunter, a suburban family are plagued by strange events when a woman and her mysterious child move into a house across the street…
The fourth installment to any franchise is always tricky. After all, the three-act structure remains the most natural way for any story to develop, and ‘part four’ always runs the risk of being little more than a needless footnote tacked onto the end of an otherwise satisfactory trilogy – consider KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, or (shudder) THE PHANTOM MENACE. Not that the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies are by any means perfect, but for all their faults, their scares do work – the winning formula is so easy it would difficult for the fourth movie to not follow in the series’ ghostly footsteps.
It isn’t the ongoing story that’s maintained audience interest in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (in fact, any attempt to weave a plot around the scares has failed miserably), but the new spin that came with each installment: the original felt genuinely fresh and was more patient in its approach than horror films had been since THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; the second amped up the violence and humour, and had a nice little twist ending; and the third simply put its camera on an axis, which is much better than it sounds. This time around, it’s Xbox Kinect (which will baffle anyone old enough to still hold a grudge against Super Mario Bros 3 end-of-level bosses), a gimmick that looks nice but fails to deliver.
This is not the biggest problem however – the first half of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 feels like a return to the original’s form, patiently building the tension very slowly and establishing some genuinely likable characters (the naturalistic exchanges between Kathryn Newton and Matt Shively are a highlight). Unfortunately, the tension fizzles out past the halfway mark, and the series’ tiresome backstory takes precedent over its major strength – scares. Cramming all the action into the last two minutes simply isn’t good enough. By that point it would take a ghostly clump around the head to shake off the boredom. Whilst the movie feels like yet another tacked on fourth installment, this is not the last we’ve seen of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY – scares or not, the franchise should manage to tack on a whole lot more before it mercifully dies.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 is released in Uk cinemas 17th October
