Worst – Paranormal Activity 4
While I thought Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones was a brilliant return to form for Oren Peli’s franchise, the previous sequel, Paranormal Activity 4, was easily the worst. Many people put Paranormal Activity 3 on a pedestal, praising Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman for inventing a rotating camera that makes for easy jump scares – congratulations, you learned how to use tools and tape! Sorry for my snark, but I actually think the second sequel is when everything REALLY started going wrong, and our third sequel crashed and burned quicker than an airplane with no engines. We meet ANOTHER family, Katie shows up AGAIN, the whole Hunter angle is coyly teased and then exposed (c’mon, kids are way scarier than that), and we meet a whole coven of witches! Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Thankfully, The Marked Ones transforms a scareless story about shape-shifting witches into a fun B-Move about, well, so much more – but we’re not here to be positive.
Paranormal Activity 4‘s big reveal was the XBOX Kinect camera usage, which when looked at through night vision, you can see every tiny motion sensor dot being projected into a room’s deepest nooks and crannies. The kids dance around and pretend they’re at a rave, but at night, when everyone is sleeping, we see an invisible figure following around the small children who are naughtily up past their bed time. Here’s the thing – it’s the third sequel. We know there’s a shady figure walking about the premises. He’s been doing it the last three movies. If you’re going to have a franchise surrounding the same found footage scares, you absolutely must keep things fresh. Choosing different cameras to present the same actions over and over again simply doesn’t work.
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones succeeded by bringing lighthearted comedy into a franchise that was either too cheesy or too dull at times. There was an insertion of new life, and Christopher Landon created a better film for it. Paranormal Activity 4, on the other hand, seemed perfectly content exploiting the same old reusable material and tried to pass a disco ball off as innovation. No scares, no laughs – just boredom.